Time as an Illusory River

"When you touch one thing
with deep awareness,
you touch everything."
— Thich Nhat Hanh
Buddhist Monk / Author
(1926 - )

"Time is the substance
from which I am made.
Time is a river
which carries me along,
but I am the river;
it is a tiger that
devours me,
but I am the tiger;
it is a fire
that consumes me,
but I am the fire. "
- Jorge Luis Borges
Author / Essayist
(1899 - 1986)

"One"

Having, with my last post, reached 200 blog entries over the seven years that I've been posting - and apropos of nothing in particular - I was curious to see what form a word cloud of my blog would take. There is a site that allows users to link to the URL of any blog (or any other web page that has an Atom or RSS feed) and then automatically generates a wordle. The wordle may be loosely tuned by selecting the font, color, visual layout, and toggling on/off the use of common words.

The resulting wordle for my blog - as of Feb 2011 - appears at the top. It is amusing to learn that - despite (or, perhaps, because of) my predilection for philosophizing, blending art and science, and general musing about all kinds of Borgesian and Kafkian realities, the most common words / phrases that fall out (i.e., are rendered in the largest font size) are, in order:

one
another
image
the whole
spiritual
part
fixed
prison
reality

As to what the cosmic significance of this particular list is, and what deeper truths it reveals - if anything - either about my past intellectual / aesthetic meanderings and/or the likelihood of specific future trajectories, I haven't a clue ;-)

Time, Space, and Mystery

“A human being is part of the
whole called by us a universe,
a part limited in time and space.

He experiences himself,
his thoughts and his feelings,
as something separate
from the rest,
a kind of optical delusion
of his consciousness.

This delusion is a kind
of prison for us;
it restricts us to our
personal decisions and our
affections to a few
persons nearest to us.

Our task must be to free
ourselves from this prison by
widening our circle of
compassion to embrace
all living creatures and the
whole of nature of its beauty.”
—Albert Einstein
(1879 - 1955)

“We know that behind every image revealed there is another image more faithful to reality, and in the back of that image there is another, and yet another behind the last one, and so on, up to the true image of that absolute, mysterious reality that no one will ever see.”

— Michelangelo Antonioni
Film Director
(1912 - 2007)

Order and Simplicity

"The obvious is that
which is never seen
until someone
expresses it simply."

- Khalil Gibran
Poet / Mystic
(1883 - 1931)

"Order is not pressure
which is imposed
from without,
but an equilibrium
which is set up
from within."
- Jose Ortega y Gasset
Philosopher
(1883 - 1955)

Harmony and Attunement

"Broadening our attunement beyond the horizons of the individual self awakens one to the meaning encoded into existence - a kind of cognitive "super-logic" that reveals a different purpose, a larger pattern, than anything we might previously have imagined. That is exactly what a spiritual awakening is - shifting from one perspective to another, until we finally glimpse meaningfulness where our mind could not perceive it before."

- Vilayat Khan
Sufi Teacher
(1916 - 2004)

"In studying ourselves,
we find the harmony
That is our total existence.
We do not make harmony.
We do not achieve it
or gain it.
It is there - all the time.
Here we are - in the midst
of this perfect way,
and our practice is
simply to realize it
and then
To actualize it
in our everyday life..."
- Hakuyū Taizan Maezumi
Japanese Zen Rōshi
(1931 - 1995)

Patterns and Transformations

"All fixed set patterns

are incapable of adaptability or pliability. The truth is outside of all fixed patterns." 

- Bruce Lee (1940 - 1973) 

 "Our bodily food is changed into us, but our spiritual food changes us into itself." 

- Meister Eckhart (1260 - 1327)

Reflections and Illusions

"You have heard much of this world
yet what you seen of this world?
What is its form and substance?...
You are asleep and your vision is a dream;
all you are seeing is a mirage.
When you awake up on the morn of the last day
you will know all this to be fancy and illusion;
When you have ceased to see double,
Heaven and Earth will become transformed;
when the real sun unveils his face to ou,
the moon, the stars,and Venus will disappear;
if a ray shines on the hard rock
like wool of many colors, it drops to pieces."
-Mahmud Shabistari
Sufi Poet
(1288 - 1340)

"Reflect: is not the dreamer, sleeping or waking, one who likens dissimilar things, who puts the copy in the place of the real object?

I should certainly say that such a one was dreaming.

But take the case of the other, who recognizes the existence of absolute beauty and is able to distinguish the idea from the objects which participate in the idea, neither putting the objects in the place of the idea nor the idea in the place of the objects-- is he a dreamer, or is he awake?"

-Plato, The Republic