Thursday, August 04, 2022

Act of Perception


"Although our modern way of thinking has, of course, changed a great deal relative to the ancient one, the two have had one key feature in common: i.e. they are both generally ‘blinkered’ by the notion that theories give true knowledge about ‘reality as it is’. Thus, both are led to confuse the forms and shapes induced in our perceptions by theoretical insight with a reality independent of our thought and our way of looking.
...
The illusion that the self and the world are broken into fragments originates in the kind of thought that goes beyond its proper measure and confuses its own product with the same independent reality. To end this illusion requires insight, not only into the world as a whole, but also into how the instrument of thought is working. Such insight implies an original and creative act of perception into all aspects of life, mental and physical, both through the senses and through the mind, and this is perhaps the true meaning of meditation.
...
Intelligence and material process have thus a single origin, which is ultimately the unknown totality of universal flux. In a certain sense, this implies that what have been commonly called mind and matter are abstractions from the universal flux, and that both are to be regarded as different and relatively autonomous orders within the one whole movement...It is thought responding to intelligent perception which is capable of bringing about an overall harmony of fitting between mind and matter."

 - David Bohm (1917 - 1992)
Wholeness and the Implicate Order

Wednesday, August 03, 2022

Light and Dark


"There's beauty in every tree and every bush.
Just take the time to look at'em.
...
Put light against light -
you have nothing.
Put dark against dark -
you have nothing.
 It's the contrast of light and dark
that each gives the other one meaning.
...
We have no limits to our world.
We're only limited by our imagination.
"

Tuesday, August 02, 2022

New Eyes


"A pair of wings, a different respiratory system, which enabled us to travel through space, would in no way help us, for if we visited Mars or Venus while keeping the same senses, they would clothe everything we could see in the same aspect as the things of the Earth. The only true voyage, the only bath in the Fountain of Youth, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to see the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to see the hundred universes that each of them sees, that each of them is; and this we do, with great artists; with artists like these we do really fly from star to star.
...
The real voyage of discovery
consists not in seeing new sights,
but in looking with new eyes

- Marcel Proust (1871 - 1922)
Remembrance of Things Past

Monday, August 01, 2022

Simple Secret


"And now here is my secret,
a very simple secret:
it is only with the heart that
one can see rightly,
what is essential is
invisible to the eye."

Antoine de Saint-Exupery (1900 - 1944)

Sunday, July 31, 2022

Tonic of Wildness


"We need the tonic of wildness...
At the same time that we are earnest
to explore and learn all things,
we require that all things
be mysterious and unexplorable,
that land and sea be indefinitely wild,
unsurveyed and unfathomed
by us because unfathomable.
We can never have
enough of nature."

Henry David Thoreau (1817 - 1862)

Saturday, July 30, 2022

Shapes, Lines, Curves, and Solids


"The world of shapes, lines, curves, and solids is as varied as the world of numbers, and it is only our long-satisfied possession of Euclidean geometry that offers us the impression, or the illusion, that it has, that world, already been encompassed in a manageable intellectual structure. The lineaments of that structure are well known: as in the rest of life, something is given and something is gotten; but the logic behind those lineaments is apt to pass unnoticed, and it is the logic that controls the system."

- David Berlinski (1942 - ) 

Friday, July 29, 2022

Primordial Purity


"The master replied: Tsogyal, the
empty essence of your awareness
is not created by anyone.
Without causes and conditions,
it is originally present.
Don't try to change
or alter awareness.
Let it remain exactly as it is!
Thus you will be free
from straying and awaken
within the state of
primordial purity."

- Padmasambhava (c. 8th - 9th centuries)
Advice from the Lotus-Born