The Limitless Aleph

"All language is a set of symbols whose use among its speakers assumes a shared past. How, then, can I translate into words the limitless Aleph, which my floundering mind can scarcely encompass? Mystics, faced with the same problem, fall back on symbols: to signify the godhead, one Persian speaks of a bird that somehow is all birds; Alanus de Insulis, of a sphere whose center is everywhere and circumference is nowhere; Ezekiel, of a four-faced angel who at one and the same time moves east and west, north and south. (Not in vain do I recall these inconceivable analogies; they bear some relation to the Aleph.) Perhaps the gods might grant me a similar metaphor, but then this account would become contaminated by literature, by fiction. Really, what I want to do is impossible, for any listing of an endless series is doomed to be infinitesimal. In that single gigantic instant I saw millions of acts both delightful and awful; not one of them occupied the same point in space, without overlapping or transparency. What my eyes beheld was simultaneous, but what I shall now write down will be successive, because language is successive. Nonetheless, I'll try to recollect what I can."

- Jorge Luis Borges (1899 - 1986)

Mind As Passage

"The utmost mission of Mind

is to train our obscure consciousness

which has emerged out of the

dark prison of Matter,

to enlighten its blind instincts,

random intuitions,

vague perceptions till it shall

become capable of this greater light

and this higher ascension.

Mind is a passage,

not a culmination."

- Sri Aurobindo (1872 - 1950)

Organic Unfoldment

"Photography! 

Summation of the life experience

Exquisite focal point of all being

Aromatic distillation

Inmost

And ultimate

Light.

From out of darkness

Ascending, once again

God alone.

Photography?

Realization,

Identity,

My religion of

Organic Infoldment.

Spatiously

In the lap of

Mother alone

Full blown as a rose,

Organic Unfoldment."

- Edmund Teske (1911 - 1996)

Revere What is Unknowable

"Science of nature has one goal:

To find both manyness and whole.

Nothing 'inside' or 'Out There,'

The 'outer' world is all 'In Here.'

This mystery grasp without delay,

This secret always on display.

The true illusion celebrate,

Be joyful in the serious game!

No living thing lives separate:

One and Many are the same."

...

We can never directly see

what is true, that is, identical with

what is divine: we look at it

only in reflection, in example,

in the symbol, in individual

and related phenomena.

We perceive it as a life

beyond our grasp,

yet we cannot deny

our need to grasp it.

...

The highest achievement

of the human being

as a thinking being is to

have probed what is

knowable and quietly to

revere what is unknowable."

- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749 - 1832)

Goethe on Science

Confrontation With Mystery

"That everything may be conceived as an illusion does not exclude the concept that all illusion is reality. Any aspect of it can be considered reality or illusion. Illusion is the game we artists play (and sleight of hand as well)... this confrontation with mystery exists all the time. Mystery, power, and the concept of going beyond one's corporeal reality. If you can't expand beyond your own limitations physically then it becomes attractive to expand your own limitations by way of mental process, spirituality, or mysticism. Mysticism is on display everywhere."

- Bruce Conner (1933 - 2008)

The Unaccountable Truth

"...to 'listen' is to be in a position where hearing is impossible--or deceptive. It is the wrong kind of listening: listening for a limited message, an objective sound, a sensible meaning. Actually one decides one's life by responding to a word that is not well defined, easily explicable, safely accounted for. One decides to love in the face of an unaccountable void, and from the void comes an unaccountable truth. By this truth one's existence is sustained in peace--until the truth is too firmly grasped and too clearly accounted for. Then one is relying on words, i.e., on one's own understanding and one's own ingenuity in interpreting existence and its "signs." Then one is lost and has to be found once again in the patient Void."

- Thomas Merton (1915 - 1968)

Existence Itself

"If you awaken from this illusion,

and you understand that

black implies white,

self implies other,

life implies death.

You can feel yourself,

not as a stranger in the world,

not as something here on probation,

not as something that has

arrived here by fluke,

but you can begin to feel

your own existence as

absolutely fundamental.

What you are basically,

deep, deep down,

far, far in,

is simply the fabric

and structure of

existence itself."

- Alan Watts (1915 - 1973)