Wake Up to Who You Really Are

Wake up to who
you really are.
Being anything
else comes at
too high a cost.
"Who you really
are" is love.
Perhaps you
forgot that you
are love; if
you did forget, go
visit or see
someone with a
new infant child.
The teaching will
be clear.

Unbounded Knowledge

Universities and colleges put boundaries on knowledge. All the arts, letters, sciences are bound within divisions and departments. Of course there is too much knowledge for any one person to grasp. Still, I wonder if we could better serve education by keeping in mind that the fragmentation of knowledge is a convenience not a reality. Real knowledge is unbounded. The mind is happiest when it glimpses the interconnection of all things.

Marble Universe

Reflection

A lake is a container and a reflector of worlds around and above; at times revealing worlds deep below the surface. 

  Three Spheres II, by M. C. Esher (lithography, 1946)   

Within each of us is a picture, a map of the entire universe. We are living holograms of all that is.  

Edge.org

I strongly recommend paying a visit to an exciting intellectual movement and website: Edge.org 
Here's the short description top of their website:

To arrive at the edge of the world's knowledge, 

seek out the most complex and sophisticated minds, 

put them in a room together, 

and have them ask each other 

the questions they are asking themselves.

All That IS

Consciousness is unbounded, 

free standing, and eternal. 

The Creator is a scientist, 

experimenting with possibilities; 

generating universes 

throughout an unbounded cosmos; 

beyond the limits of individual ego. 

The ancients would say: 

Om tat sat (All that is).

Cook Book

Melting down is an experience which happens to everyone from time to time. It's a breaking point. Whether it builds over a long period of time or just happens all at once, it breaks us down and melts us to the most basic of ingredients. At the time, they seem to be negative ingredients such as fear and despair yet, even these break down into the building blocks from which we are solidified. The fear melts down and becomes surrender. Surrender melts down and becomes peace. Peace then melts down to become harmony. Once we are in harmony, we are one with everything; we are whole. We are solidified again yet, this time with different ingredients because we remember the bitter taste of fear. It's like adding too much spice to a dish. Next time, you know to add less and counter balance it with another spice. Take what life dishes out; fulfill your hunger and be full again.

Spy Glass

Without emptiness
How could you find space?
Without noise
How could you find silence?
Without want
There is nothing left to be found

I Sight

After a long and stressful day, it's helpful to engage in activities that calm and relieve the anxiety which has built up after many hours of work. This can be done through many methods: mediation, taking a hike or simply watching the sunset. Yet, there are other methods to unwind and sometimes they seem more appealing due to the quick relief they provide. It seems so simple to use a method which delivers instant gratification. This is only temporary. Look at an object though a bottle. The image which you see is skewed due to the refraction of the light. By attempting to use this method to unwind, it skews what is truly present. It's incredibly different then what is seen by the unaltered eye; it is a broken image. Don't refract the light after a long day by looking at it through a bottle; embrace the last rays of the setting sun.

To the Anonymous Commenter

http://philosopher-at-large.blogspot.com/2012/08/time-goes.html

“What happens when you feel so far from the light? I read about stillness and peace here but they are just concepts to me. I want to be one with everything too. I want to be happy like you.”

I've been meditating on this all day and I have got to say that it’s incredibly difficult to respond to this. I want to say that you are always one. That you are not far from the light because you are a part of that light. Peace and stillness are always there whether we experience them consciously or not because they don’t need to be conceptualized.

These statements, I believe, are all true.

But I feel it wouldn't help. They would just become more concepts, especially when you feel like this. I know because I was here yesterday. I wanted to say to everyone, “I want to be happy like you!” Yet, unlike you, I didn't. I didn't have the courage.

I wrote a post entitled ‘Bad Day’ but decided not to publish it because I felt it was too out of place. The post was about separation; a choice to see separation and do nothing about it. I couldn't post that. No way. It wasn't peaceful, spiritual or helpful at all. But you had the courage to do something which I did not. You confronted your feelings of separation to reach out and express how you felt. 

I can't tell you how to feel peaceful or still or even happy. All I can say is that in our feeling of separation, you and I are one. You can't be far from the light, my friend, if it is your light which gives me the courage to post on a bad day.

"Bad Day"

Pure light is right behind this cellophane wrap. I can see it. I could touch it even...only if I made the choice to finally tear it away. But it’s that choice which is the hardest. To shed everything and step towards it. Be one; truly luminous. I can see the cellophane. But I don't want to walk through. I'd rather compromise and continue to watch the pretty light...

Wendell E. Berry - delivers 41st Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities

Wendell E. Berry, noted poet, essayist, novelist, farmer, and conservationist, delivers the 41st Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities, entitled “It All Turns on Affection,” from the Concert Hall of The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts on April 23rd, 2012. Mr. Berry is introduced by Jim Leach, Chairman of The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), and preceded by a reading by novelist, short story writer, and fellow Kentuckian Bobbie Anne Mason of Berry’s poem “VI” from his collection Leavings. Please go to http://www.neh.gov/news/2012-jefferson-lecture-wendell-berry for more details and complete video of his Jefferson Lecture. 

Spring Day

When a bubble pops, it's either followed by laughter or by sadness. When we are young, we laugh while we pop bubbles; the pure joy of simply popping the bubbles which surround us. Then at a certain age, we get surrounded by a bubble which can be 'popped' by others. "Thanks for popping my bubble!" This usually causes sadness. Be young again and laugh when your bubble pops. It shows you a new direction and helps you realize that you were never stuck in a bubble to being with.

Great Fall

You are not broken. Working through dark feelings can be crippling, but even in that state, you are not broken. We are not eggs. We might suffer to unimaginable extremes, but we are still not broken. Though, at times, it feels like we need all the kings horses and all the kings men, you never have to be put back together again.

Undivided wholeness

In the very early phases of the development of civilization, man's views were essentially of wholeness rather than of fragmentation. In the East (especially India) such views still survive, in the sense that philosophy and religion emphasize wholeness and imply the futility of analysis of the world into parts. Why, then, do we not drop our fragmentary Western approach and adopt these Eastern notions which include not only a self-world view that denies division and fragmentation but also techniques of meditation that lead the whole process of mental operation non-verbally to the sort of quiet state of orderly and smooth flow needed to end fragmentation both in the actual process of thought and in its content?

David Bohm*

To know the whole, we begin with fragments and end with a leap of faith to the oneness of all things. Our true work is to realize wholeness within the fragments of our own life. The whole is not a thing – just as the Self is not a thing. Realizing this, we realize all that is. In fact, we become whole; in becoming whole we realize the great human virtue of integrity.

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Image: Three Spheres II, by M. C. Esher (lithography, 1946). First suggested to me from page 258 of Douglas Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach. New York, Basic Books, 1979. Oddly enough, Hofstadter was using this image for the idea of Indra’s Net – a metaphor I had not imaged him using in all these years since reading the book.

* Wholeness and the Implicate Order by David Bohm.