Above the ignorance

23rd January 2012

Quote reblogged from Solitary Forager with 129 notes

After you have exhausted what there is in business, politics, conviviality, and so on—have found that none of these finally satisfy, or permanently wear—what remains? Nature remains.

19th January 2012

Quote reblogged from Above the ignorance with 12 notes

See, the source of all light is in the eye. If there were no eyes in this world, the sun would not be light. So if I hit as hard as I can on a drum which has no skin, it makes no noise. So if a sun shines on a world with no eyes, it’s like a hand beating on a skinless drum. No light. YOU evoke light out of the universe, in the same way you, by nature of having a soft skin, evoke hardness out of wood. Wood is only hard in relation to a soft skin. It’s your eardrum that evokes noise out of the air. You, by being this organism, call into being this whole universe of light and color and hardness and heaviness and everything.

19th January 2012

Quote reblogged from Above the ignorance with 7 notes

We identify in our experience a differentiation between what we do and what happens to us. We have a certain number of actions that we define as voluntary, and we feel in control of those. And then over against that, there is all those things that are involuntary. But the dividing line between these two is very inarbitrary. Because for example, when you move your hand, you feel that you decide whether to open it or to close it. But then ask yourself how do you decide? When you decide to open your hand, do you first decide to decide? You don’t, do you? You just decide, and how do you do that? And if you don’t know how to do it, is it voluntary or involuntary? Let’s consider breathing. You can feel that you breath deliberately; you don’t control your breath. But when you don’t think about it, it goes on. Is it voluntary or involuntary?

So, we come to have a very arbitrary definition of self. That much of my activity which I feel I do. And that then doesn’t include breathing most of the time; it doesn’t include the heartbeats; it doesn’t include the activity of the glands; it doesn’t include digestion; it doesn’t include how you shape your bones; circulate your blood. Do you or do you not do these things? Now if you get with yourself and you find out you are all of yourself, a very strange thing happens. You find out that your body knows that you are one with the universe. In other words, the so-called involuntary circulation of your blood is one continuous process with the stars shining. If you find out it’s YOU who circulates your blood, you will at the same moment find out that you are shining the sun. Because your physical organism is one continuous process with everything else that’s going on. Just as the waves are continuous with the ocean. Your body is continuous with the total energy system of the cosmos, and it’s all you. Only you’re playing the game that you’re only this bit of it. But as I tried to explain, there are in physical reality no such thing as separate events.