Mutual Interdependece

"The realm of yin and yang is the life where we oppose one thing against the other: good against bad, up against down, heaven against earth, this against that, self against other, form against emptiness, speech against silence. This is not a matter that exists in the realm of yin and yang points to the place where there’s a merging of opposites. In the Identity of Relative and Absolute we chant: 'Within light there is darkness but do not try to understand that darkness. Within darkness there is light, but do not look for that light.' Light and darkness are opposites, yet each one of them contains the other. They’re mutually arising and interdependent. There’s no separation between them. We tend to see them as separate, but they’re not... form is emptiness, emptiness is form, form is exactly emptiness, emptiness exactly form. Can it be any more specific and clear than that?"

- John Daido Loori (1931 - 2009)

Bringing It to Life

Mystery and Art of Living

"The mystery and art of living are as grand as the sweep of a lifetime and the lifetime of a species. And they are as close as beginning, quietly, to mine whatever grace and beauty, whatever healing and attentiveness, are possible in this moment and the next and the next one after that."

-  Krista Tippett (1960 - )

Becoming Wise:
An Inquiry into the Mystery and Art of Living

Indefinite Meaning

"We can express our feelings regarding the world around us either by poetic or by descriptive means. I prefer to express myself metaphorically. Let me stress: metaphorically, not symbolically. A symbol contains within itself a definite meaning, certain intellectual formula, while metaphor is an image. An image possessing the same distinguishing features as the world it represents. An image — as opposed to a symbol — is indefinite in meaning. One cannot speak of the infinite world by applying tools that are definite and finite. We can analyse the formula that constitutes a symbol, while metaphor is a being-within-itself, it's a monomial. It falls apart at any attempt of touching it."

- Andrei Tarkovsky (1932 - 1986)

Life is a Secret

"The deeper we look into nature, the more we recognize that it is full of life, and the more profoundly we know that all life is a secret and that we are united with all life that is in nature. Man can no longer live his life for himself alone. We realize that all life is valuable and that we are united to all this life.  From this knowledge comes our spiritual relationship with the universe."

- Albert Schweitzer (1875-1965)

Limit of Our Sight

"Life is eternal,

love is immortal

and death is only a horizon.
Life is eternal as we

move into the light
and the horizon is nothing
save the limit of our sight."

- Carly Simon

Built on Opposites

"All being, it seemed, was built on opposites, on division. Man or woman, vagabond or citizen, lover or thinker — no breath could both be in and out, none could be man and wife, free and yet orderly, knowing the urge of life and the joy of intellect. Always the one paid for the other, though each was equally precious and essential."

- Hermann Hesse (1877 - 1962)

Narcissus and Goldmund

Mind

"Matter and energy

seem granular in structure,

and so does 'life,'

but not so mind."

- Erwin Schrödinger (1887 - 1961)

Dream Before the Awakening

"It is possible to believe

that all the past is but

the beginning of a beginning,

and that all that is and

has been is but the

twilight of the dawn.

It is possible to believe

that all the human mind

has ever accomplished is

but the dream

before the awakening."

- H. G. Wells (1866 - 1946)

Breathed on by Light

"It was the hour in which objects lose the consistency of shadow that accompanies them during the night and gradually reacquire colors, but seem to cross meanwhile an uncertain limbo, faintly touched, just breathed on by light; the hour in which one is least certain of the world's existence."

- Italo Calvino (1923 - 1985)

The Nonexistent Knight & The Cloven Viscount

Mountains Simply Exist

"The secret of the mountain is that the mountains simply exist, as I do myself: the mountains exist simply, which I do not. The mountains have no "meaning," they are meaning; the mountains are. The sun is round. I ring with life, and the mountains ring, and when I can hear it, there is a ringing that we share. I understand all this, not in my mind but in my heart, knowing how meaningless it is to try to capture what cannot be expressed, knowing that mere words will remain when I read it all again, another day."

- Peter Matthiessen (1927 - 2014)

The Snow Leopard

Silence

"My friend, I am not what I seem. Seeming is but a garment I wear — a care-woven garment that protects me from thy questionings and thee from my negligence. The 'I' in me, my friend, dwells in the house of silence, and therein it shall remain for ever more, unperceived, unapproachable."

- Kahlil Gibran (1883 - 1931)

The Madman

A Patchwork Quilt

"Our aesthetic sense, whether in works of art or in lives, has overfocused on the stubborn struggle toward a single goal rather than on the fluid, the protean, the improvisatory. We see achievement as purposeful and monolithic, like the sculpting of a massive tree trunk that has first to be brought from the forest and then shaped by long labor to assert the artist’s vision, rather than something crafted from odds and ends, like a patchwork quilt, and lovingly used to warm different nights and bodies."

- Mary Catherine Bateson (1939 - )

Composing a Life

Network of Perceptions

"A world of evanescent impressions; a world without matter or spirit, neither objective nor subjective, a world without the ideal architecture of space; a world made of time, of the absolute uniform time of [Newton’s] Principia; a tireless labyrinth, a chaos, a dream.

"Once matter and spirit — which are continuities — are negated, once space too is negated, I do not know with what right we retain that continuity which is time. Outside each perception (real or conjectural) matter does not exist; outside each mental state spirit does not exist; neither does time exist outside the present moment.

"And yet, and yet… Denying temporal succession, denying the self, denying the astronomical universe, are apparent desperations and secret consolations. Our destiny … is not frightful by being unreal; it is frightful because it is irreversible and iron-clad.

Time is the substance

I am made of.

Time is a river which

sweeps me along

but I am the river;

it is a tiger which

destroys me,

but I am the tiger;

it is a fire which

consumes me,

but I am the fire.

The world, unfortunately, is real;

I, unfortunately, am Borges."

- Jorge Luis Borges (1899 - 1986)

"A New Refutation of Time," Labyrinths

Amidst the Mystery

"To know objects only through dissecting and
cataloguing them is to miss their full reality.

It is to fall asleep amidst the mystery
and to become numb to the wonder
of this great Earth"

- John Daido Loori

(1931 - 2009)

Distant Memories

"The Cosmos is all that is or was or ever will be. Our feeblest contemplations of the Cosmos stir us - there is a tingling in the spine, a catch in the voice, a faint sensation, as if a distant memory, of falling from a height. We know we are approaching the greatest of mysteries."

- Carl Sagan (1934 - 1996)

Unfathomable Mystery

"The man who comes back through the Door in the Wall will never be quite the same as the man who went out. He will be wiser but less sure, happier but less self-satisfied, humbler in acknowledging his ignorance yet better equipped to understand the relationship of words to things, of systematic reasoning to the unfathomable mystery which it tries, forever vainly, to comprehend."

- Aldous Huxley (1894 - 1963)

The Doors of Perception

Hypostatized Information

"We hypostatize information into objects. Rearrangement of objects is change in the content of the information; the message has changed. This is a language which we have lost the ability to read. We ourselves are a part of this language; changes in us are changes in the content of the information. We ourselves are information-rich; information enters us, is processed and is then projected outward once more, now in an altered form. We are not aware that we are doing this, that in fact this is all we are doing."

- Philip K. Dick (1928 - 1982)

Receiving the World

"Paradoxical as it may seem,

the purposeful life has no content,

no point. It hurries on and on,

and misses everything. Not hurrying,

the purposeless life misses nothing,

for it is only when there is

no goal and no rush that

the human senses are

fully open to receive the world."

- Alan Watts

(1915 - 1973)

Mind and Matter

"Whole and unity; thing or entity or being. Every whole is a unity and every unity that is divisible is a whole. For example, the primitive concepts, the monads, the empty set, and the unit sets are unities but not wholes. Every unity is something and not nothing. Any unity is a thing or an entity or a being. Objects and concepts are unities and beings... In materialism all elements behave the same. It is mysterious to think of them as spread out and automatically united. For something to be a whole, it has to have an additional object, say, a soul or a mind. 'Matter' refers to one way of perceiving things, and elementary particles are a lower form of mind. Mind is separate from matter... Classes and concepts may, however, also be conceived as real objects, namely classes as 'pluralities of things' or as structures consisting of a plurality of things and concepts as the properties and relations of things existing independently of our definitions and constructions. It seems to me that the assumption of such objects is quite as legitimate as the assumption of physical bodies and there is quite as much reason to believe in their existence. They are in the same sense necessary to obtain a satisfactory system of mathematics as physical bodies are necessary for a satisfactory theory of our sense perceptions."

- Kurt Godel (1906 - 1978)

Nothing Normal About Nature

"The truth is, however,

that there is nothing very

“normal” about nature.

Once upon a time

there were no flowers at all"

- Loren Eiseley (1907 - 1977)

The Immense Journey