Mossy Path

"Whence are we born into this world? Wither lies the way by which we may return thither? So deign you to ask in your quest for that knowledge now lost to you. Yet I implore you, seek not that which lies within your good self in some place far removed from yourself. The several teachings that the Buddha has bequeathed us, different one from another though they may seem, have, as he himself has taught us, but a single source. People’s desires and aspirations are as different as their faces, and thus the Buddha teaches through a variety of Expedient Means. Yet the Way by which one endeavors to attain enlightenment, whether one be of high station or low, can be no other than to penetrate to the very source of consciousness. The rain falls alike on all plants and trees; and though the season of their bloom may be early or late, all blossom forth in colorful splendor. Likewise is it with the many different teachings of the Buddha; they are like the dewdrops, having but a single hue of their own, [but appearing to differ] because the cast of people’s minds is not constant. The body, be it that of one either deep in sin or one exalted in virtue, ends ultimately in the same form, as dew upon the mossy path. That which knows no limits, from the distant past into the future, which has neither beginning nor end, lies within your own honored mind. If it be tied by earthly cares and attachments, then never will it escape from the Three Worlds but must wander aimlessly through the Six Realms. In the dark of night, the three thousand greater worlds are far removed and invisible to the Corporeal Eye. Yet open the Mind’s Eye and that far-off world of enlightenment may be seen unobstructed. So you see, there is no need for you to become a monk and relinquish your reign. Even in your present exalted position, if you just set your mind upon it, you can attain enlightenment."

- Reading The Tale of Genji:
Sources from the First Millennium

Reflecting Surrealities

"I believe in the future resolution of these two states, dream, and reality, which are seemingly so contradictory, into a kind of absolute reality, surreality, so to speak.

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↑ top

up

position

down

↓ bottom

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Everything leads us to believe that there exists a spot in the mind from which life and death, the real and the imaginary, the past and the future, the high and the low, the communicable and the incommunicable will cease to appear contradictory."

- André Breton (1896 - 1966)
Manifestoes of Surrealism

(Missing) Inhabitants of Impossible Worlds

"It is impossible for the inhabitants of different worlds to walk or sit or stand on the same floor, because they have differing conceptions of what is horizontal and what is vertical. Yet they may well share the use of the same staircase. On the top staircase illustrated here, two people are moving side by side and in the same direction, and yet one of them is going downstairs and the other upstairs. Contact between them is out of the question because they live in different worlds and therefore can have no knowledge of each other's existence.

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Only those who attempt the absurd...
will achieve the impossible.
I think ...

I think it's in my basement...
Let me go upstairs and check."

- M. C. Escher (1898 - 1972)

Aphanipoiesis

"Aphanipoiesis (n.) combines two words from ancient Greek to describe this way in which life coalesces toward vitality in unseen ways. Aphanis comes from a Greek root meaning “obscured, unseen, unnoticed;” poiesis is from one meaning “to bring forth, to make.” Other words which also carry the root aphanis include “phantom,” “diaphanous,” and “phenomenon,” while the root poiesis is familiar from the word “poetry,” along with Maturana and Varela’s autopoiesis.

According to Peirce, abduction is the process of forming an explanatory hypothesis and is the only logical operation that introduces any new idea. Central to the abductive process is the notion of hypothesis. But what does a hypothesis say about the anticipatory systems of perception of any given observer? In noticing aphanipoiesis, exploring the realm of unseen contributors coalescing to produce the foundations of the hypothesis itself becomes relevant. The hypothesis is limited by pre-existing anticipatory patterns. If one listens only for what one knows to listen for, that is what will be heard. In the study of aphanipoiesis, the hypothesis is an indicator of those pre-habituated perceptions through which new information will be filtered. Familiarity with something in one context enables a kind of description of another context to become a basis for experiencing any kind of newness. A new flavor is explored through the experience of known flavors; a new form of music is explored by understanding other forms. Ultimately, the abductive process becomes a zone of untamed, unnamed, unseen, and essential contributors to what may later be called emergence. "

- Nora Bateson (1968 - )
Aphanipoiesis

Spiritualistic Painting

"All Chinese painting, which is not a matter of naturalistic but of spiritualistic painting, is to be contemplated as the soul's landscape. It is as subject to subject, and from the perspective of intimate confidence, that man connects with nature there. This nature is no longer an inert, passive entity. If we regard it, it regards us as well; if we speak to it, it speaks to us as well. Evoking Jingting Mountain, the poet Li Bai affirms: 'We regard one another tirelessly,' which echoes the painter Shitao who, with regard to Mount Huang, says 'Our tête-a-tête is endless.' At all times in China, poets and painters are in this relationship of collaboration and mutual revelation with nature. The beauty of the world is an appeal, in the most concrete sense of the word, and humans, those beings of language, respond to it with all their soul. Everything occurs as if the universe, thinking to itself, were awaiting man to speak."

- Francois Cheng (1929 - )
The Way of Beauty: Five Meditations for Spiritual Transformation

Myo

D.T. Suzuki describes the Japanese word myo (for which there is no single-word equivalent in English) as a "certain artistic quality perceivable not only in works of art but in anything in Nature or life. The sword in the hands of the swordsman attains this quality when it is not a mere display of technical skill patiently learned under the tutorship of a good master...The hands may move according to the technique given out to every student, but there is a certain spontaneity and personal creativity when the technique, conceptualized, and universalized, is handled by the master hand. Myo may also be applied to the intelligence and the instinctive activities of various animals, for example the beaver building its nest, the spider spinning its web, the wasp or ant constructing its castles under the eaves or beneath the ground. They are the wonders of Nature. In fact, the whole universe is a miraculous exhibition of a master mind, and we humans who are one of its wonderful achievements have been straining our intellectual efforts ever since the awakening of consciousness and are daily being overwhelmed by Nature's demonstrations of its unfathomable and inexhaustible myo. The awakening of consciousness has been the greatest cosmological event in the course of evolution. We have been able by its practical application to probe into the secrets of nature and make use of them to serve our way of living, but at the same time we seem to be losing the many things we have otherwise been enjoying which Nature has been liberal enough to grant us. The function of human consciousness, as I see it, is to dive deeper and deeper into its source, the unconscious."

- D.T. Suzuki (1870 - 1966) 
Zen and Japanese Culture

Curious Stillness of Autumn

"The wind swept down the rows, next morning,
swaying the branches of the trees,
and the windfalls dropped to
the ground with soft thuds.
Frost was in the wind,
and between gusts the curious
stillness of autumn."

- John Steinbeck (1902 - 1968)

"Although leaves remained on the beeches and the sunshine was warm, there was a sense of growing emptiness over the wide space of the down. The flowers were sparser. Here and there a yellow tormentil showed in the grass, a late harebell or a few shreds of purple bloom on a brown, crisping tuft of self-heal. But most of the plants still to be seen were in seed. Along the edge of the wood a sheet of wild clematis showed like a patch of smoke, all its sweet-smelling flowers turned to old man’s beard. The songs of the insects were fewer and intermittent. Great stretches of the long grass, once the teeming jungle of summer, were almost deserted, with only a hurrying beetle or a torpid spider left out of all the myriads of August. The gnats still danced in the bright air, but the swifts that had swooped for them were gone and instead of their screaming cries in the sky, the twittering of a robin sounded from the top of a spindle tree. The fields below the hill were all cleared. One had already been plowed and the polished edges of the furrows caught the light with a dull glint, conspicuous from the ridge above. The sky, too, was void, with a thin clarity like that of water. In July the still blue, thick as cream, had seemed close above the green trees, but now the blue was high and rare, the sun slipped sooner to the west and, once there, foretold a touch of frost, sinking slow and big and drowsy, crimson as the rose hips that covered the briar. As the wind freshened from the south, the red and yellow beech leaves rasped together with a brittle sound, harsher than the fluid rustle of earlier days. It was a time of quiet departures, of the sifting away of all that was not staunch against winter.'"

- Richard Adams (1920 - 2016)
Watership Down