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The primary point of awareness for those who practice the way is to be free from the idea of the self.[next]— Dogen (Tanahashi 2004, 10)
Now, if a bird or a fish tries to reach the end of its element before moving in it, this bird or this fish will not find its way or its place. When you find your place where you are, practice occurs, actualizing the fundamental point. When you find your way at this moment, practice occurs, actualizing the fundamental point; for the place, the way, is neither large nor small, neither yours nor others’. The place, the way, has not carried over from the past, and it is not merely arising now. Accordingly, in the practice-enlightenment of the buddha way, to attain one thing is to penetrate one thing; to meet one practice is to sustain one practice.[next]— Dogen, Genjokoan (Tanahashi 2010, 32)
Pai Chang said, “All sayings and writings return to one's self.”What do you mean by that? [next]— Blue Cliff Record (Cleary and Cleary 1977, 490)
The child finds its mother when it leaves her womb.[next]— Tagore, Fruit-Gathering, X
If you know you're alive,[next]
find the essence of life.
Life is the sort of guest
you don't meet twice.— the Bijak of Kabir
The point is that the purpose of these conversations is to discover the “rules.” It's like life— a game whose purpose is to discover the rules, which rules are always changing and always undiscoverable.[next]— Gregory Bateson, ‘Metalogue’ (1972, 19-20)
Now upon a continuous line there are no points (where the line is continuous), there is only room for points,— possibilities of points. Yet it is through that continuum, that line of generalization of possibilities, that the actual point at one extremity necessarily leads to the actual point at the other extremity. The actualization of the two extremities consists in the two facts that at the first, without any general reason the continuum there begins while at the last, equally without reason, it is brutally, i.e. irrationally but forcibly cut off.[next]— Peirce, “PAP” (R 293, 1906; NEM 4, 330)
The Buddha said many times, ‘My teaching is like a finger pointing to the moon. Do not mistake the finger for the moon.’[next]— Thich Nhat Hanh (1998, 17)
From the Glossary appended to Dogen's Treasury of the True Dharma Eye:
turning point: 轉処 [tensho]. 轉機 [tenki], literally, turning event. A place where delusion is transformed into enlightenment.— Tanahashi 2010, 1139
Only when you get here will you know (the meaning of the) ancient saying, ‘Mind revolves along with myriad phenomena; the turning point is truly mysterious.’— Blue Cliff Record, Case 22 (Cleary and Cleary 1977, 152)
How to discern the point? Even the Buddhas of the past, present and future, and even the Zen masters over the ages, cannot shoot this black star. How do you shoot it?[next]— Hakuin (Cleary 2002, 4)
Every test of a theory, whether resulting in its corroboration or falsification, must stop at some basic statement or other which we decide to accept. If we do not come to any decision, and do not accept some basic statement or other, then the test will have led nowhere. But considered from a logical point of view, the situation is never such that it compels us to stop at this particular basic statement rather than that, or else give up the test altogether. For any basic statement can again in its turn be subjected to tests, using as a touchstone any of the basic statements which can be deduced from it with the help of some theory, either the one under test, or another. This procedure has no natural end. Thus if the test is to lead us anywhere, nothing remains but to stop at some point or other and say that we are satisfied, for the time being.[next]— Popper (1934/1959, 86)
Life is made meaningful by death. Death as natural closure punctuates a most particular event in the ongoing transformation of things.— Roger T. Ames (2002, 168)
Eternal life is the kind of life that includes death.[next]— Thich Nhat Hanh (1995, 143)
Can one describe, as if seeing it from above, something within which we are contained, of which we are part, and from which we cannot exit?— Umberto Eco (1998, 20)
The actual world cannot be distinguished from a world of imagination by any description.— Peirce (EP1:227, W5:164, CP 3.363)
It is harder to get lost in an imagined forest than in a real one.[next]— Stanislaw Lem (1981, 188)
Show me the face you had before the world was born.[next]— Hui-neng
All things and all phenomena are just one mind; nothing is excluded or unrelated.[next]— Dogen, ‘Bendowa’ (Tanahashi 2010, 15)
All things hang like a drop of dewor in Dogen's ‘Genjokoan’:
Upon a blade of grass.— ‘Gratitude to the Unknown Instructors’
Enlightenment is like the moon reflected on the water. The moon does not get wet, nor is the water broken. Although its light is wide and great, the moon is reflected even in a puddle an inch wide. The whole moon and the entire sky are reflected in dewdrops on the grass, or even in one drop of water.(Tanahashi 2010, 31)
For Thomas Traherne it was the Cross: ‘There may we see the most Distant Things in Eternity united: all Mysteries at once couched together and Explained’ (First Century 58). The Cross is, of course, the point of Crossing, or of fixation or final determination – or, as the icon of extension, the monadic point pulled in four directions at once, or the point radiating in all directions from the inside out. [next]
The pearl in Thomas 76, or in the Middle English poem; the big fish in Thomas 8; the hidden treasure – each is a symbol of the phaneron.
The timeless thusness of this one bright pearl is boundless. It is just that the entire world of the ten directions is one bright pearl, not two or three. The entire body is one true dharma eye, the true body, a single phrase. The entire body is illumination; the entire body is the entire mind. When the entire body is the entire body, there is no hindrance. It is gently curved and turns round and round.— Dogen, ‘One Bright Pearl’ (Tanahashi 2010, 37)
It contains past and present, the three worlds, the ten directions, delusions, enlightenment, all buddhas, sentient beings, birth, and death.— Nishiari Bokusan (Weitsman, Wenger and Okumura 2011, 12)
Who sends the mind to wander afar? Who first drives life to start on its journey? Who impels us to utter these words? … What cannot be spoken with words, but that whereby words are spoken: Know that alone to be Brahman, the spirit …— Kena Upanishad (Mascaró)
The spirit is that which can have no resting place.— Merleau-Ponty (1948, 75)
Ezekiel excoriates false prophets as those who have “not gone up into the gaps.” The gaps are the thing. The gaps are the spirit’s one home, the altitudes and latitudes so dazzlingly spare and clean that the spirit can discover itself for the first time like a once-blind man unbound. The gaps are the clifts in the rock where you cower to see the back parts of God; they are the fissures between mountains and cells the wind lances through, the icy narrowing fjords splitting the cliffs of mystery. Go up into the gaps. If you can find them; they shift and vanish too. Stalk the gaps. Squeak into a gap in the soil, turn, and unlock— more than a maple— a universe. This is how you spend this afternoon, and tomorrow morning, and tomorrow afternoon. Spend the afternoon. You can’t take it with you.— Annie Dillard (2009, 422)
to live in the gap
between the moment that is expiring
and the one that is arising
luminous
and empty— Laurie Anderson, Heart of a Dog
The space between heaven and earth is like a bellows.
The shape changes, but not the form;
The more it moves, the more it yields.— Tao Te Ching 5 (Feng/English)
… and the wind returneth again according to his circuits.[next]— Ecclesiastes 1:6 (KJV)
Set the bird's wings with gold and it will never again soar in the sky.— Tagore, Stray Birds 231
He who binds to himself a joy[next]
Does the winged life destroy
But he who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in eternity's sun rise— from William Blake's notebook
Security is mostly a superstition.— Helen Keller, The Open Door
In insecurity to lie
Is joy's insuring quality.— Emily Dickinson (FH #1434)
Angels can fly because they can take themselves lightly.— G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
Therefore I say unto you, Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on. Is not the life more than meat, and the body than raiment?
…
And why take ye thought for raiment? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin:
And yet I say unto you, That even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.
…
Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.— Matthew 6:25, 28-9, 34 (KJV)
You are really the natural form of emptiness, so there is no need to fear.— Tibetan Book of the Dead (Trungpa/Fremantle)
Firm as the thunderbolt, the seat of the seeker is established above the void.— Kabir I.68 (Tagore 1915)
The Realized One comes from nowhere and goes nowhere; that is why he is called the Realized One.[next]— Diamond Sutra (Cleary 1998, 140)
There is nowhere the knowledge of the enlightened does not reach. Why? There is not a single sentient being who is not fully endowed with the knowledge of the enlightened; it is just that because of deluded notions, erroneous thinking, and attachments, they are unable to realize it. If they would get rid of deluded notions, then universal knowledge, spontaneous knowledge, and unobstructed knowledge would become manifest. It is as if there were a great scripture, equal in extent to a billion-world universe, in which are written all the things of the universe— … Though this scripture is equal in measure to a billion-world universe, yet it entirely rests in a single atom; and as this is so of one atom, it is also true of all atoms. Then suppose someone with clear and comprehensive knowledge, who has fully developed the celestial eye, sees these scriptures inside atoms, not benefiting sentient beings at all, and with this thought— ‘I should, by energetic power, break open those atoms and release those scriptures so that they can benefit all sentient beings’— then employs appropriate means to break open the atoms and release the great scriptures, to enable all sentient beings to benefit greatly. Similarly, the knowledge of Buddha, infinite and unobstructed, universally able to benefit all, is fully inherent in the bodies of sentient beings; but the ignorant, because of clinging to deluded notions, do not know of it, are not aware of it, and so do not benefit from it. Then the Buddha, with the unimpeded, pure, clear eye of knowledge, observes all sentient beings in the cosmos and says, ‘How strange— how is it that these sentient beings have the knowledge of Buddha, but in their folly and confusion do not know it or perceive it? I should teach them the way of the sages and cause them forever to shed deluded notions and attachments, so they can see in their own bodies the vast knowledge of buddhas, no different from the buddhas.’[next]— The Flower Ornament Scripture (Avatamsaka-Sutra), Book XXXVII (Cleary 1993, 1002-3)
One sound preaching the Dharma is the arrival of the time.[next]— Dogen, ‘Bussho’ (Waddell and Abe 2002, 96)
When one bit of dust is raised, it includes the great earth; when one flower opens, the whole world is aroused. When a single moment of thinking is dropped away, the eighty-four thousand afflicting delusions are removed. When one phrase hits our true function, eighty-four thousand Dharma gates are fulfilled. For example, it is like when one pulls the main line and immediately the whole net follows, or when one lifts the collar and the whole cloth quickly comes as well. The one is uncountable, and the uncountable is one. The large manifests within the small, and the small manifests within the large. On one hairtip, the sanctuary of the jewel king appears; within an atom, the great Dharma wheel turns. Great assembly, please tell me, how does the sanctuary of the jewel king appear; how does the great Dharma wheel turn?[next]— Dogen, EK 6.458
And he said, ‘The kingdom of God is as if a man should scatter seed upon the ground, and should sleep and rise night and day, and the seed should sprout and grow, he knows not how. The earth produces of itself, first the blade, then the ear, then the full grain in the ear. But when the grain is ripe, at once he puts in the sickle, because the harvest has come.’Let him who has ears hear: ears grow in the everyday and everynight earth of practice. The kingdom is not consciously constructed, as no one knows how to do that; the role of consciousness here is to harvest the fruits of unconscious process, to let the felt sense find its expression in a form of self-control grounded in experience.— Mark 4:26-29 (RSV)
The mind's attention to itself is really to the working memory of its (immediately prior) activity. When we engage in this recursive activity, becoming conscious of consciousness, there is a temptation to believe that we are ascending a hierarchy toward a ‘pure’ consciousness. But perhaps our consciousness of consciousness is no more conscious than was the original grounded awareness. The life of the organism depends on its awareness of the Other systems that constitute its context, not on its Self-awareness. If we believe in our arrogance that we are more than organisms, we become less than mindful, breaking the meaning cycle of semiosis manifesting as practiception.
Harvest-time comes in a flash, and when the lightning flashes it lightens the “past” as well as the “future.” Presence becomes an all-encompassing space of interbeing rather than a point on a timeline.
where we conceive a mere Quality of Feeling, or Firstness, to represent itself to itself as Representation. Such, for example, would be Pure Self-Consciousness, which might be roughly described as a mere feeling that has a dark instinct of being a germ of thought. This sounds nonsensical, I grant. Yet something can be done toward rendering it comprehensible.[next]
…
Imagine that upon the soil of a country, that has a single boundary line thus ○ and not ○○ or ◎, there lies a map of that same country. This map may distort the different provinces of the country to any extent. But I shall suppose that it represents every part of the country that has a single boundary, by a part of the map that has a single boundary, that every part is represented as bounded by such parts as it really is bounded by, that every point of the country is represented by a single point of the map, and that every point of the map represents a single point in the country. Let us further suppose that this map is infinitely minute in its representation so that there is no speck on any grain of sand in the country that could not be seen represented upon the map if we were to examine it under a sufficiently high magnifying power. Since, then, everything on the soil of the country is shown on the map, and since the map lies on the soil of the country, the map itself will be portrayed in the map, and in this map of the map everything on the soil of the country can be discerned, including the map itself with the map of the map within its boundary. Thus there will be within the map, a map of the map, and within that, a map of the map of the map, and so on ad infinitum. These maps being each within the preceding ones of the series, there will be a point contained in all of them, and this will be the map of itself. Each map which directly or indirectly represents the country is itself mapped in the next; i.e., in the next is represented to be a map of the country. In other words each map is interpreted as such in the next. We may therefore say that each is a representation of the country to the next map; and that point that is in all the maps is in itself the representation of nothing but itself and to nothing but itself. It is therefore the precise analogue of pure self-consciousness. As such it is self-sufficient. It is saved from being insufficient, that is as no representation at all, by the circumstance that it is not all-sufficient, that is, is not a complete representation but is only a point upon a continuous map.— Peirce, EP2:161-2, CP 5.71
The confusions which occupy us arise when language is like an engine idling, not when it is doing work.It is not our aim to refine or complete the system of rules for the use of our words in unheard-of ways.
For the clarity we are aiming at is indeed complete clarity. But this simply means that the philosophical problems should completely disappear.
The real discovery is the one that makes me capable of stopping doing philosophy when I want to. —The one that gives philosophy peace, so that it is no longer tormented by questions which bring itself in question. —Instead, we now demonstrate a method, by examples; and the series of examples can be broken off. —Problems are solved (difficulties eliminated), not a single problem.
There is not a philosophical method, though there are indeed methods, like different therapies.
— Wittgenstein (PI I.132-3)
Cut off learning and there will be nothing more to worry about.[next]— Dao De Jing 20 (Ames)
A thing may be said to be wherever it acts; but the notion that a particle is absolutely present in one part of space and absolutely absent from all the rest of space is devoid of all foundation.According to Swimme and Berry (1992, 28),— Peirce (CP 1.38, c. 1890)
to speak of a proton as a separate particle restricted to a certain patch of space-time is to speak of its microphase mode of being, a valid though limited understanding. The macrophase mode or presence of the proton includes all particles with which it is correlated, which includes all those particles it has interacted with at any time in the past. Since the universe bloomed from a seed point, this means that a full understanding of a proton requires a full understanding of the universe. The fireball manifests itself as a quintillion separate particles and their interactions, but the nature of each of these particles speaks of the universe as indivisible whole. No part of the present can be isolated from any other part of the present or the past or the future.
Good and evil, dead and alive, everything blooms from one natural stem.[next]— Rumi (Helminski 2000, 111)
We live inside a dream.[next]— Is it yours?
The reason the world is able to be lasting and enduring[next]
Is because it does not live for itself.— Dao De Jing 7 (Ames)
The world is a mirror of Infinite Beauty, yet no man sees it. It is a Temple of Majesty, yet no man regards it. It is a region of light and Peace, did not men disquiet it. It is the Paradise of God. It is more to man since he is fallen than it was before. It is the place of Angels and the Gate of Heaven. When Jacob waked out of his dream, he said, God is here, and I wist it not. How dreadful is this place! This is none other than the House of God and the Gate of Heaven.— Thomas Traherne, The First Century 31
The unstruck drum of Eternity is sounded within me; but my deaf ears cannot hear it.— Kabir I.83 (Tagore 1915)
O ESSENCE OF NEGLIGENCE!
Myriads of mystic tongues find utterance in one speech, and myriads of hidden mysteries are revealed in a single melody; yet, alas, there is no ear to hear, nor heart to understand.— Bahá'u'lláh, The Hidden Words (Persian) 16
The messages cease to be messages when nobody can read them.— Bateson 1979, 51
The adventure of the universe depends upon our capacity to listen.— Swimme and Berry 1992, 44
The world puts off its mask of vastness to its lover. It becomes as small as one song, as one kiss of the eternal.[next]— Tagore, Stray Birds
Eternity is in love with the productions of time.— Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
Let us love the country of here below. It is real; it offers resistance to love.[next]— Simone Weil (as quoted by Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tnker Creek, 233)
You shall love your neighbor as yourself.— Matthew 19:19 (RSV)
Love the world as your own self; then you can truly care for all things.— Tao Te Ching 13 (Feng/English)
He who wants to do good knocks at the gate; he who loves finds the gate open.— Tagore, Stray Birds
Unless our love is made of understanding, it is not true love.— Thich Nhat Hanh (1998, 83)
Let every one speak the truth with his neighbor, for we are members one of another.[next]— Ephesians 4:25 (RSV)
All buddhas are realization; thus all things are realization. Yet, no buddhas or things have the same characteristics; none have the same mind. Although there are no identical characteristics or minds, at the moment of your actualization, numerous actualizations manifest without hindrance. At the moment of your manifestation, numerous manifestations come forth without touching one another. This is the straightforward teaching of the ancestors.To ‘reach one thing,’ 法 通 (ippō tsū), is ‘the total experience of a single thing’ in Hee-Jin Kim's translation:Do not use the measure of oneness or difference as the criterion of your study. Thus, it is said, “To reach one thing is to reach myriad things.” To reach one thing does not take away its inherent characteristics. Just as reaching does not make one thing separate, it does not make one thing not separate. To try to make it not different is a hindrance. When you allow reaching to be unhindered by reaching, one reaching is myriad reachings. One reaching is one thing. Reaching one thing is reaching myriad things.— Dogen, ‘Gabyo’ (Tanahashi 2010, 444)
‘The total experience of a single thing’ does not deprive a thing of its own unique particularity. It places a thing neither against others nor against none. To place a thing against none is another form of dualistic obstruction. When total experience is realized unobstructedly, the total experience of a single thing is the same as the total experience of all things. A single total experience is a single thing in its totality. The total experience of a single thing is one with that of all things.— Dogen, SBGZ ‘Gabyo’ (Kim 1975, 66)
In the Firstness of its Thirdness, there is no difference between these two translations of ‘Gabyo’, or between the total experience of a single thing and 法 通.
For Dogen, the enlightened person was adept at appropriating the semantic possibilities of ordinary words in order to express and act out the extraordinary, and even the ineffable, according to the situation. Dogen's characteristic way of thinking here in connection with the use of language was that the meaning of an ordinary word was totally exerted so that there was nothing but that particular meaning throughout the universe at that given moment. This was the idea of the total exertion of a single thing, which was central to Dogen's entire thought.The total exertion of a single meaning is a pure expression of what Peirce called thought, which comes naturally to children learning to use language, before they learn about the difference between words and meaning, or thought and expression.— Kim (1975, 88)
The child, with his wonderful genius for language, naturally looks upon the world as chiefly governed by thought; for thought and expression are really one. As Wordsworth truly says, the child is quite right in this; he is an “eye among the blind,”Hence the advice of all the sages that realization of this great truth, or of the buddha-nature or the Kingdom of Heaven or the Firstness of Thirdness, depends on learning from little children. [next]
“On whom those truths do rest
Which we are toiling all our lives to find.”
But as he grows up, he loses this faculty; and all through his childhood he has been stuffed with such a pack of lies, which parents are accustomed to think are the most wholesome food for the child,— because they do not think of his future,— that he begins real life with the utmost contempt for all the ideas of his childhood; and the great truth of the immanent power of thought in the universe is flung away along with the lies.— Peirce, MS 464-5 (CP 1.349, 1903)
How resplendent the luminaries of knowledge that shine in an atom, and how vast the oceans of wisdom that surge within a drop!— Bahá'u'lláh, Kitáb-i-Íqán ¶107
Wan-sung says: ‘The moment one particle is brought up, the whole earth is contained in it. Who is it that can open the borders and extend the land as a lone rider with a single lance, and so can be the master anywhere and encounter the source in everything?’— Cleary 1997b, 323
The vast inconceivable source can't be faced or turned away from.— Shitou (Tanahashi and Schneider 1994, 36)
Do not think that to face a person is to understand a person. Do not think that not to face a person is not to understand a person. Those who understand a speck of dust understand the entire world. Those who master one thing master myriad things. Those who do not master myriad things do not master one thing. Because those who study mastering see myriad things as well as one thing through penetration, those who study a speck of dust simultaneously study the entire world.— Dogen, ‘Shoaku makusa’ (Tanahashi 2010, 102)
One thought. fills immensity.— Blake (MHH)
This is the abode of those with unobstructed eyes
Who perceive infinite lands, buddhas, beings,
And ages, in a single point, going in and out
Without encountering any boundaries.— Gandhavyuha Sutra (Cleary 1984, 1459)
One statement removes obstructing fixations; one statement fills everywhere. Tell me, which statement do the enlightened ones use to help people?
I have a statement that the enlightened ones have never made, and which I will quote to you.
Complete.— Dogen (Cleary 1995, 47)
As for summing up all spoken words into a single phrase, gathering the universe into a single atom, dying the same and being born the same, piercing and penetrating in all ways, is there anyone who can stand witness?[next]— Blue Cliff Record, Case 92, ‘Pointer’
We have to find out how we can best serve the whole community, yet we must do this through our own personal action and responsibility. We are completely independent while at the same time we are fully part of the community. So, how can we actualize both sides of our lives within one action? This is really the basic point of our lives.[next]— Okumura 2010, 20.
I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.[next]— Maslow, The Psychology of Science
You can't have everything. Where would you put it?— Steven Wright
To have plenty is to be perplexed.— Tao Te Ching 22 (Chan)
In a consumer society there are inevitably two kinds of slaves: the prisoners of addiction and the prisoners of envy.— Ivan Illich, Tools for Conviviality (1973), Ch. 3
Anybody that competes with slaves becomes a slave.— Vonnegut, Player Piano
Every need got an ego to feed.— Bob Marley, ‘Pimper's Paradise’
And whoso is saved from his own greed, such are the successful.— Qur'án 64:16 (Pickthall)
A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone.— Thoreau, Walden, chp. 2
There is no greater sin than desire,[next]
No greater curse than discontent,
No greater misfortune than wanting something for oneself.
Therefore he who knows that enough is enough will always have enough.— Tao Te Ching 46 (Feng/English)
Hunt for bounty with the net of gratitude.[next]— Rumi (Helminski 2000, 59)
Seekers of gold dig up much earth and find little.— Heraclitus (D.22, Kahn VIII)
He who knows he has enough is rich.— Tao Te Ching 33 (Feng/English)
Too much is not enough.— anon
Wisdom asks nothing more.[next]— Wallace Stevens, Adagia
The wise are they that speak not unless they obtain a hearing.— Bahá'u'lláh, Hidden Words (Persian) #36
Perfect activity leaves no track behind it; perfect speech is like a jade-worker whose tool leaves no mark.— Tao Te Ching 27 (Waley)
Time heals all wounds as silence heals all words.[next]— gnox
Open your mouth, always be busy, and life is beyond hope.— Tao Te Ching 52 (Feng/English)
Almost dotty! I must dash!— Finnegans Wake, 360
Humankind is made of haste. I will show you all My signs, so do not try to hurry Me.— Qur'án 21:37 (Cleary)
A large consciousness is idle and spacey; a small consciousness is cramped and circumspect. Big talk is bland and flavorless; petty talk is detailed and fragmented. We sleep and our spirits converge; we awake and our bodies open outward. We give, we receive, we act, we construct: all day long we apply our minds to struggles against one thing or another— struggles unadorned or struggles concealed, but in either case tightly packed one after another without gap. The small fears leave us nervous and depleted; the large fears leave us stunned and blank. Shooting forth like an arrow from a bowstring: such is our presumption when we arbitrate right and wrong. Holding fast as if to sworn oaths: such is our defense of our victories. Worn away as if by autumn and winter: such is our daily dwindling, drowning us in our own activities, unable to turn back. Held fast as if bound by cords, we continue along the same ruts. The mind is left on the verge of death, and nothing can restore its vitality.— Zhuangzi (Ziporyn 2009, 10)
Are you not danzzling on the age of a vulcano? Siar, I am deed.— Finnegans Wake, 89
He who acts defeats his own purpose; he who grasps loses.— Tao Te Ching 64 (Feng/English)
Procrastinate now![next]— anon.
Only he who has a spirit of extreme humility can be said to have a resolute intellect.— Gandhi (1926, 47)
The only wisdom we can hope to acquire
Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless.— T.S. Eliot, ‘East Coker’
Stand before it and there is no beginning.
Follow it and there is no end.
Stay with the ancient Tao,
Move with the present.— Tao Te Ching 14 (Feng/English)
It is good to have an end to journey toward; but it is the journey that matters, in the end.[next]— Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
If you want to know the meaning of buddha-nature, observe the conditions of the time.— Blue Cliff Record (Cleary 2002, 126)
Spacetime tells matter how to move; matter tells spacetime how to curve.— J. A. Wheeler, Geons, Black Holes, and Quantum Foam (2000), p. 235.
When you come to a fork in the road – take it.— Yogi Berra
Always think twice before taking advice.[next]— gnox
every part supports the whole just as much as it is supported by the whole; a connexion in which no part is first and no part last, in which the whole gains in clearness from every part, and even the smallest part cannot be fully understood until the whole has been first understood.His advice to the reader, therefore, was to read the book twice. My advice to the Ideal Reader of Turning Signs is to take the whole thought of the Obverse as context for every point to be presented on the Reverse (and here in the Universe).— Schopenhauer (1859, xii)
Here we have another turn of the hermeneutic circle. But if the ‘single thought’ of the book cannot be expressed in a single sentence, or indeed in any shorter form than the book itself, how can any actual reader see it as a single thought? Can you really see it all at once? This question applies to the meaning cycle in all its guises, because it arises from the very nature of signs, which according to Peirce are of virtually unlimited size and complexity.
Giving to the word sign the full scope that reasonably belongs to it for logical purposes, a whole book is a sign; and a translation of it is a replica of the same sign. A whole literature is a sign.Nor is the question limited in scope to literature, or even to language in all its forms. Ideally, every sign is ‘connected with the “Truth,” i.e. the entire Universe of being’ (Peirce, EP2:303). A complete and explicit model of the connections would take up no less meaning space than that Universe itself, which is ‘perfused with signs.’ But a model working implicitly can be represented by the smallest possible sign, which will then show simply the wholeness of the “Truth.” [next]— Peirce, EP2:303
Man muß nur gehn: Kein Gefühl ist das fernste.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.— Rainer Maria Rilke, Book of Hours, tr. Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy (p. 83)
Where now? Who now? When now? Unquestioning. I, say I. Unbelieving. Questions, hypotheses, call them that. Keep going, going on, call that going, call that on.[next]— Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable (p. 1)
When rivers enter the ocean, the waters lose their names.—Chih-i (Cleary 1997c, 486)
The name that can be named is not the eternal name.— Tao Te Ching 1 (Feng/English)
Dongshan instructed the assembly saying, “Experiencing the matter of going beyond buddhas, finally capable, you can speak a little.”[next]
A monk immediately asked, “What is speaking?”
Dongshan said, “At the time of speaking, you do not hear.”
The monk said, “Master, do you hear or not?”
Dongshan said, “Just when I do not speak, then I hear.”— Dogen, EK 9.50
How is it when it is expressed completely in a single phrase?Your turn. [next]— Dogen, EK 2.133
I never actually collect together, or call up simultaneously, all the primary thoughts which contribute to my perception or to my present conviction.— Merleau-Ponty 1945, 71)
No particular thought reaches through to the core of our thought in general, nor is any thought conceivable without another possible thought as a witness to it.In more Peircean terms, a ‘particular thought’ is an abstraction from the continuum of semiosis, whose ‘core’ is living the time. Sign, object and interpretant (Merleau-Ponty's “thought as a witness”) are all abstracted from the process in order to symbolize and explicate semiosis.— Merleau-Ponty (1945, 465)
… thought is not at all only the moving around of fixed entities, concepts that are defined, ‘pieces’ of knowledge. Thought is always very largely implicit and, as I tried to show (in ECM and in ‘Thinking Beyond Patterns,’ 1992) the implicit is not some fringe or periphery around what we centrally think. Rather, the sense we are making, the central point we are making, is had only as a carrying forward of an implicit complexity. What is implicitly functioning is the point itself, of what we are saying or thinking, just then.[next]— Eugene Gendlin (1998, 8a)
Someone else is speaking with my mouth, but I’m listening only to my heart.— Bob Dylan, ‘I and I’ (1983)
The Eye sees more than the Heart knows.— Blake, Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1793)
Forget this moment and grow into the next. That is the only way.… So the point on each moment is to forget the point and extend your practice.— S. Suzuki (2002, 18)
So why, pray, sign anything as long as every word, letter, penstroke, paperspace is a perfect signature of its own?— Finnegans Wake, 115
Leave the letter that never begins to go, find the latter that ever comes to end, written in smoke and blurred by mist and signed of solitude, sealed at night.— The Restored Finnegans Wake, 260
— Dream. On a nonday I sleep. I dreamt of a somday. On a wonday I shall wake.— The Restored Finnegans Wake, 373
— As you sing it it's a study. That letter selfpenned to one's other, that neverperfect everplanned!
— This nonday diary, this allnights newseryreel.— The Restored Finnegans Wake, 380
Ring the bells that still can ring. Forget your perfect offering. There is a crack a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in.[next]— Leonard Cohen, ‘Anthem’
When He Himself reveals Himself, Brahma brings into manifestation That which can never be seen.[next]
As the seed is in the plant, as the shade is in the tree, as the void is in the sky, as infinite forms are in the void –
So from beyond the Infinite, the Infinite comes; and from the Infinite the finite extends.
The creature is in Brahma, and Brahma is in the creature: they are ever distinct, yet ever united.
He Himself is the tree, the seed, and the germ.
He Himself is the flower, the fruit, and the shade.
He Himself is the sun, the light, and the lighted.
He Himself is Brahma, creature, and Maya.
He Himself is the manifold form, the infinite space;
He is the breath, the word, and the meaning.
He Himself is the limit and the limitless: and beyond both the limited and the limitless is He, the Pure Being.
He is the Immanent Mind in Brahma and in the creature.
The Supreme Soul is seen within the soul,
The Point is seen within the Supreme Soul,
And within the Point, the reflection is seen again.
Kabîr is blest because he has this supreme vision!— Kabir, I.85 (‘Sâdho, Brahm alakh lakhâyâ’) (Tagore)
It's difficult to see the picture when you are inside the frame.— anon
So long as I keep before me the ideal of an absolute observer, of knowledge in the absence of any viewpoint, I can only see my situation as being a source of error. But once I have acknowledged that through it I am geared to all actions and all knowledge that are meaningful to me, and that it is gradually filled with everything that may be for me, then my contact with the social in the finitude of my situation is revealed to me as the starting point of all truth, including that of science and, since we have some idea of the truth, since we are inside truth and cannot get outside it, all that I can do is define a truth within the situation.— Merleau-Ponty, quoted in Prigogine and Stengers 1984, 299
To seek Buddhahood apart from living beings is like seeking echoes by silencing sounds.— Layman Hsiang (Cleary 1999, 93)
Seeking enlightenment apart from the world[next]
Is like looking for horns on a hare.— Hui-neng (Cleary 1998, 23)
As the plow follows words, so God rewards prayers.— Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Plate 9
Prayers plow not! Praises reap not![next]
Joys laugh not! Sorrows weep not!— Blake, MHH Plate 9
The body of the world which is broken into pieces is the body of the god. As the Christians say: others bequeath to their heirs their property, but he bequeathed himself, that is the flesh and blood of his body. The fall is the Fall into Division of the one universal man.— N.O. Brown (1966, 21)
Literally, the Bible is a gigantic myth, a narrative extending over the whole of time from creation to apocalypse, unified by a body of recurring imagery that ‘freezes’ into a single metaphor cluster, the metaphors all being identified with the body of the Messiah, the man who is all men, the totality of logoi who is one Logos, the grain of sand that is the world.[next]— Northrop Frye (1982, 224)
Everything that happens will happen today …— Byrne and Eno
… everything which happens is infinitely improbable.[next]— Peirce, W3:337
Nostalgia just isn't what it used to be.— anon
Everything is always becoming something other than what it was becoming.— Floyd Merrell (2003, 70)
The past will never look like the future did.[next]— gnox
How you look depends on where you go.[next]— gnox
He is cured by faith who is sick of fate. The prouts who will invent a writing there ultimately is the poeta, still more learned, who discovered the raiding there originally. That's the point of eschatology our book of kills reaches for now in soandso many counterpoint words. What can't be coded can be decorded if an ear aye sieze what no eye ere grieved for. Now, the doctrine obtains, we have, let me suggest, occasioning cause causing effects and affects occasionally recausing altereffects. Or I will take it upon myself to twist the penman's tale posterwise. The gist is the gist of Shaum but the hand is the hand of Sameas.— The Restored Finnegans Wake, 374-5 (FW 482-3)
Same as it ever was …[next]
Same as it ever was …
Same as it ever was …
Same as it ever was …
Water dissolving … and water removing
There is water at the bottom of the ocean
Under the water, carry the water
Remove the water at the bottom of the ocean!
Letting the days go by
Let the water hold me down
Letting the days go by
Water flowing underground
Into the blue again
Into the silent water
Under the rocks and stones
There is water underground
Letting the days go by
Let the water hold me down
Letting the days go by
Water flowing underground
Into the blue again
After the money's gone
Once in a lifetime
Water flowing underground
And you may ask yourself
What is that beautiful house?
And you may ask yourself
Where does that highway lead to?
And you may ask yourself
Am I right? … Am I wrong?
And you may say to yourself
My God! … What have I done?!
Letting the days go by
Let the water hold me down
Letting the days go by
Water flowing underground
Into the blue again
Into the silent water
Under the rocks and stones
There is water underground
Letting the days go by
Let the water hold me down
Letting the days go by
Water flowing underground
Into the blue again
After the money's gone
Once in a lifetime
Water flowing underground
Same as it ever was …
Same as it ever was …
Same as it ever was …
Look where my hand was
Time isn't holding us
Time isn't after us
Same as it ever was …
Same as it ever was …
Same as it ever was …
Same as it ever was …
Same as it ever was …
Same as it ever was …
Same as it ever was …
And here the twister comes
Here comes the twister
Same as it ever was …— David Byrne, Talking Heads, ‘Once in a Lifetime’
The universe is sacred. You cannot improve it.— Daodejing 29 (Feng/English)
There is no changing the nature created by God. That is the right religion, but most of humanity does not know.What if these are two versions of the same proposition, two instances of the same statement?— Qur'an 30:30 (Cleary)
Can you improve it? [next]
… a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.— Herbert Simon (1971)
More words count less.[next]— Tao Te Ching 5 (Feng/English)
As the primal point of existence, Hokhmah is symbolized by the yod, the smallest of the letters, the first point from which all the other letters will be written. Here all of Torah, the text and the commentary added to it in every generation—indeed all of human wisdom—is contained within a single yod.— Green (2004, 40)
Knowledge is a single point, but the ignorant have multiplied it.(As Voltaire is said to have remarked in a different context, ‘the multitude of books is making us ignorant.’ Here in the Anthropocene, the ignorance has been multiplied a thousandfold by the “social media.”)— Islamic hadith (“tradition”) attributed to the Prophet Muhammad or the Imám Alí
Another hadith quotes the Imám Alí as saying that
All that is in the world is in the Qur’an, and all that is in the Qur’an is condensed in the first chapter of the Book, and all that is in the first chapter is in the basmala [first verse], and all that is in the basmala is in the bā’ [first letter, ب], and I am the point under the bā’.We might read this as a reference to the extreme compression of meaning found in turning signs. They seem to have a magical quality of turning meaning inside out, as it were, so that a single verse says it all: rather than serving as one of many particles in a vast System, it seems to be the point around which the System revolves – the I of the cyclone, in which Author and Reader are one with Scripture. As Northrop Frye puts it (1982, 208-9), ‘Ideally, every sentence is the key to the whole Bible … every sentence is a kind of linguistic monad.’(Lawson 2012, 102)
The Zohar (1:21a) speaks of ‘primordial light prevailing on the first day’; in the Babylonian Talmud, Rabbi El'azar said that ‘With the light created by the blessed holy one on the first day, one could gaze from one end of the universe to the other’ (ZP I.159).
Next: Re:creation →
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