Buddha Lands

Water is not concerned with past,
future, present or the phenomenal world.
Even in a drop of water, innumerable 
buddha lands appear."

- Dogen (1200 - 1253)

Former World

"Geologists, dealing always with deep time, find that it seeps into their beings and affects them in various ways.  They see the unbelievable swiftness with which one evolving species on the earth has learned to reach into the dirt of some tropical island and fling 747s into the sky. They see the thin band in which are the all but indiscernible stratifications of Cro-Magnon, Moses, Leonardo and now. Seeing a race unaware of its own instantaneousness in time, they can reel off all the species that have come and gone, with emphasis on those that have specialized themselves to death. [...] Consider the earth’s history as the old measure of the English yard, the distance from the king’s nose to the tip of his outstretched hand. One stroke of a nail file on his middle finger erases human history."

- John McPhee (1931 - )
Basin and Range

A Kind of Gravitas

"Stones possess a kind of gravitas, something ultimate and unchanging, something that will never perish or else has already done so. They attract through intrinsic, infallible, immediate beauty, answerable to no one, necessarily perfect yet excluding the idea of perfection in order to exclude approximation, error, and excess. This spontaneous beauty thus precedes and goes beyond the actual notion of beauty, of which it is at once the promise and the foundation.

...

I speak about stones that have always lain outside or that sleep in their deposits, in veins, at night. They have not aroused the interest of the archeologist, nor the artist or the diamond merchant. No palace, statue, jewel, no dyke, embankment or tombstone was built from them. They are neither useful nor famous. Their facets decorate no ring or diadem. They do not bear lists of victories, or state laws, in indelible numerals. They are not boundary markers or steel, and do not earn credit or deference from bearing with bad weather. They only attest to their own presence.

...

I speak about stones as algebra, vertigo and order; stones as hymns and quincunxes; stones as stings and corollas, on the brink of dreams, catalyst and image. [...] As one speaks about flowers, leaving botany, gardening and flower arranging aside, still having a lot to discuss, so will I overlook mineralogy, ignoring the arts that give stones a purpose. I speak of bare stones - fascination and glory! - that both hide and yield up a mystery, slower, more immense and more profound than the fate of a short-lived species."

- Roger Caillois (1913 - 1978)

Materializing Reverie

"My pleasure still is to follow the stream, to walk along its banks in the right direction, in the direction of the flowing water, the water that leads life towards the next village...Dreaming beside the river, I gave my imagination to the water, the green, clear water, the water that makes the meadows green. ...The stream doesn’t have to be ours; the water doesn’t have to be ours. The anonymous water knows all my secrets. And the same memory issues from every spring. [...] Water becomes heavier, darker, deeper; it becomes matter. And it is then that materializing reverie, uniting dreams of water with less mobile, more sensual matter, finds the full weight of its repose."

- Gaston Bachelard (1884 - 1962)
Water and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Matter 

Original Face

"The Sixth Ancestor was pursued by Ming the head monk as far as Ta-yü Peak. The teacher, seeing Ming coming, laid the robe and bowl on a rock and said, 'This robe represents the Dharma. There should be no fighting over it. You may take it back with you.' Ming tried to lift it up, but it was as immovable as a mountain. Shivering and trembling, he said, 'I came for the Dharma, not for the robe. I beg you, lay brother, please open the Way for me.' The teacher said, 'Don’t think good; don’t think evil. At this very moment, what is the original face of Ming the head monk?' In that instant Ming had great satori. Sweat ran from his entire body. In tears he made his bows saying, 'Beside these secret words and secret meanings, is there anything of further significance?' The teacher said, 'What I have just conveyed to you is not secret. If you reflect on your own face, whatever is secret will be right there with you.' Ming said, 'Though I practiced at Huang-mei with the assembly, I could not truly realize my original face. Now, thanks to your pointed instruction, I am like someone who drinks water and knows personally whether it is cold or warm. Lay brother, you are now my teacher.' The teacher said, 'If you can say that, then let us both call Huang-mei our teacher. Maintain your realization carefully.'"

 - Dajian Huineng (638 - 713)
Case 23 of Mumonkan

Ceasing to Stir

"Just let your minds become void and
environmental phenomena will void themselves;
let principles cease to stir and events
will cease stirring of themselves.
...
Ordinary people look to their surroundings,
while followers of the Way look to Mind,
but the true Dharma is to forget them both.
...
I assure you that one who comprehends
the truth of 'nothing to be attained' is
already seated in the sanctuary where
he will gain his Enlightenment."

- Huang Po (? - 850)
The Zen Teaching of Huang-Po:
On the Transmission of Mind

Everything is Flowing

"...everything is flowing—going somewhere,
animals and so-called lifeless
rocks as well as water."

- John Muir (1838 - 1914)

"Our Intellect Ingulphs Itself so Far"

"The glory of Him who moveth everything
  Doth penetrate the universe, and shine
  In one part more and in another less.
...
Within that heaven which most his light receives
  Was I, and things beheld which to repeat
  Nor knows, nor can, who from above descends;
...
Because in drawing near to its desire
Our intellect ingulphs itself so far,
That after it the memory cannot go."

- Dante Alighieri (1265 - 1321)
Divine Comedy / Paradiso
Translation above by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Mimir’s Well

"Odin’s eye remains in Mimir’s well,
preserved by the waters that feed the world ash,
seeing nothing, seeing everything. Time."

- Neil Gaiman (1960 - )
Norse Mythology

The Mysticism of Numbers

"When a man counts one, two, three,
he is not only doing mathematics, he is
on the path to the mysticism of numbers
in Pythagoras and Vitruvius and Kepler,
to the Trinity and the signs of the Zodiac."

- Jacob Bronowski (1908 - 1974)

Sage Stillness

"The sound of water says what I think.

...

The stillness of the sages does not belong to them as a consequence of their skillful ability; all things are not able to disturb their minds;-- it is on this account that they are still. When water is still, its clearness shows the beard and eyebrows (of him who looks into it). It is a perfect Level, and the greatest artificer takes his rule from it. Such is the clearness of still water, and how much greater is that of the human Spirit! The still mind of the sage is the mirror of heaven and earth, the glass of all things.

...

People do not mirror themselves in running water,
they mirror themselves in still water.
Only what is still can still the
stillness of other things."

- Chuang Tzu (c.369 B.C. - c.286 B.C.)

What Are Things?

"As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;

As tumbled over rim in roundy wells Stones ring;

like each tucked string tells, each hung bell’s

Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;

Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:

Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;

Selves—goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,

Crying, What I do is me: for that I came."

- Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844 - 1889)
Quoted in Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality,
by Timothy Morton (1968 - )

Fossilized Marvin

"Sorry, did I say something wrong? said Marvin, dragging himself on regardless. Pardon me for breathing, which I never do anyway so I don't know why I bother to say it, oh God I'm so depressed. Here's another one of those self-satisfied doors. Life! Don't talk to me about life.

...

Having solved all the major mathematical, physical, chemical, biological, sociological, philosophical, etymological, meteorological and psychological problems of the Universe except for his own, three times over, [Marvin] was severely stuck for something to do, and had taken up composing short dolorous ditties of no tone, or indeed tune. The latest one was a lullaby. Marvin droned,

Now the world has gone to bed,

Darkness won't engulf my head,
I can see in infrared,
How I hate the night.
He paused to gather the artistic and
emotional strength to tackle the next verse.
Now I lay me down to sleep,
Try to count electric sheep,
Sweet dream wishes you can keep,
How I hate the night.
...

The first ten million years were the worst," said Marvin, "and the second ten million years, they were the worst too. The third ten million years I didn't enjoy at all. After that I went into a bit of a decline."

- Douglas Adams (1952 - 2001)
Hitchiker's Guide to The Galaxy

Photographer's note. This is an "old" image from a trip my wife I took to Niagara Falls, Canada a little over two years ago. I stumbled across it by accident while searching for something else on my hard drive, but now can't stop "seeing" it as some absurd Douglas-Adams-esque fossilization of Marvin-the-Robot - and I bet that now you won't be able to either 😊:

Zen Compositions

"The harder we try to catch hold of the moment, to seize a pleasant sensation..., the more elusive it becomes... It is like trying to clutch water in one's hands - the harder one grips, the faster it slips through one's fingers.

...

But you cannot understand life and its mysteries as long as you try to grasp it. Indeed, you cannot grasp it, just as you cannot walk off with a river in a bucket. If you try to capture running water in a bucket, it is clear that you do not understand it and that you will always be disappointed, for in the bucket the water does not run. To “have” running water you must let go of it and let it run.

...

Trying not to grasp is the same thing as to grasp since it's motivation is the same, my urgent desire to save my self from a difficulty. I can not get rid of this desire since it is one and the same desire as the desire to get rid of it."

- Alan Watts (1915 - 1973)

Postscript. My last post explained what my recent series of "autumnal abstracts" has to do with quantum mechanics. This post is meant to convey the complementary explanation of what my autumnal abstracts have to do with Zen. Leaving aside the unintentional recursivity of the word "complementary" (since the concept has a formal meaning in quantum mechanics), here is an alternative summary of how using knee-high waterproof boots to get "up close and personal" to patterns of leaves in the creek - ostensibly to get better compositions - failed miserably. As I explained in the last post, no matter how slowly I approached a clump of leaves, invariably, the ripples induced in the water by my boots would dislodge one or more of the key elements of whatever composition I saw in my mind's eye. By the time I stood over the spot where I saw the original pattern, most of the leaves were gone. Here is where the Zen side of story begins...

The first day I donned my boots, it took me about a dozen attempts to learn how to "minimally disturb" whatever it was that caught my eye; to emphasize, not one, two or a few tries, but an embarrassingly many attempts. It was vastly harder than I anticipated. At some point - after my 3rd or 4th failure - I dejectedly poked my tripod into the water, angry with myself at being unable to do such a "simple” thing. So there I stood, knee-deep in water, immersed in a euphonious Siren call of delicately beautiful patterns I so wished to capture but which vanished the instant I approached them, when the absurdity of it all finally struck me like a Zen-master's cane! I doubled over with laughter, as multiple versions of Alan Watt's "the harder we try to catch hold of the moment..." aphorisms leapt to mind.

Adding to this genuinely Zen-like moment was the fact that two joggers just happened to be close enough to see and hear me. They both turned in unison to see what the source of the absurd laughter was. Without breaking stride or uttering a word, they just stared at what from their perspective must have seemed a "not quite all there and possibly drunk photographer" and ran off into the woods. I laughed for a few more moments, resolved to remember this little creek's Zen lesson, and resumed searching for interesting and evanescent patterns.

So, are my (still ongoing) "autumnal abstracts" a lesson in quantum mechanics? in Zen? or something else entirely? In the end, it's all just a matter of perspective 😊

Replenishing My Soul

"The psyche, if you understand it as a phenomenon occurring in living bodies, is a quality of matter, just as our body consists of matter. We discover that this matter has another aspect, namely, a psychic aspect. It is simply the world seen from within. It is just as though you were seeing into another aspect of matter."

- C. G. Jung (1875-1961)
The Earth Has a Soul

Postscript. Some of you may have noticed that for the past month or so I have been posting "autumnal abstracts" consisting mostly of small, intimate compositions of leaves, rocks, reflections and gentle water flow. But while these rapid-fire posts may seem like I have had a "lot of time on my hands," the truth is actually the reverse. But therein lies an important (albeit "obvious") lesson for all creatives: when you objectively have "no time" for creative endeavors, force yourself to find a pocket of time, however small - it can be measured in minutes! - to nourish your soul. Of course, this is particularly hard to achieve after enduring a long string of "day job" hours; in my case, 10+ hours days consisting of working on endless equations and computer code, and dealing with recursively multiplying deadlines for deliverables). As the "day job" hours increase so does the need to to recharge; unfortunately, since fatigue also grows (in my case, exponentially) with "day job" effort, there is a point of no return wherein you'll find yourself too tired to carve out what (at this point, is now a critically vital) "pocket of time" to recharge. So what does one do? In my case, when I am able to work from home, I force myself to stop work about an hour before the sun sets, grab a camera and tripod, and drive a few miles to a local trail that runs along a small creek. I park my car at the end of a residential cul-de-sac and walk about 300 feet to a "little bridge" ... (iPhone panorama):

It is here around this little bridge and the shallow leaf-strewn creek that I let my soul breath for however many precious few minutes I have until the sun sets, while my eye happily searches for intimate compositions of leaves, rocks, reflections and gentle water flow! 15 to 20 minutes in this oasis is usually all I need (and, often, all I have) to forget about me equations and replenish my soul.

In my next post, I'll explain what these "autumnal abstracts" have to do with quantum mechanics, albeit from a more whimsical than physics perspective.

The Spiritual-Abstract Nexus

"Visual artists, from the generation born in the 1860s to contemporary times, have turned to a variety of antimaterialist philosophies, with concepts of mysticism or occultism at their core. Terms such as occultism or mysticism should be defined carefully because of the association with the ineffable that surrounds these words and because they are context-specific: art historians and artists use these terms differently than do theologians or sociologists. In the present context mysticism refers to the search for the state of oneness with ultimate reality. Occultism depends upon secret, concealed phenomena that are accessible only to those who have been properly initiated. The occult is mysterious and not readily available to ordinary understanding or scientific reason. 

Several ideas are common to most mystical and occult world views: the universe is a single, living substance; mind and matter also are one; all things evolve in dialectical opposition, thus the universe comprises paired opposites (male-female, light-dark, vertical-horizontal, positive-negative); everything corresponds in a universal analogy, with things above as they are below; imagination is real; and self-realization can come by illumination, accident, or an induced state: the epiphany is suggested by heat, fire or light. The ideas that underlie mystical-occult beliefs were transmitted through books, pamphlets, and diagrams, often augmented by illustrations that, because of the ineffable nature of the ideas discussed, were abstract or emphasized the use of symbols.

...

The five underlying impulses within the spiritual-abstract nexus—cosmic imagery, vibration, synesthesia, duality, sacred geometry—are in fact five structures that refer to underlying forms of thought."

- Maurice Tuchman (1936 - )
“Hidden Meanings in Abstract Art"
in The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890-1985

The Cosmic Being

"A thousand heads hath Purusha, a thousand eyes, a thousand feet;
On every side pervading, he fills a space ten fingers wide.
This Purusha is all that yet hath been and all that is to be;
The Lord of Immortality which waxes greater still by food.

So mighty is His greatness; yea, greater than this is Purusha.

All creatures are one-fourth of Him, three-fourths eternal life in heaven.

With three-quarters Purusha went up: one-quarter of Him again was here.
...

When they divided Puruṣa how many portions did they make?

What do they call his mouth, his arms? What do they call his thighs and feet?

 The Brahman was his mouth, of both his arms was the Rājanya made.

His thighs became the Vaiśya, from his feet the Śūdra was produced.

The Moon was gendered from his mind, and from his eye the Sun had birth;

Indra and Agni from his mouth were born, and Vāyu from his breath.
 Forth from his navel came mid-air the sky was fashioned from his head

Earth from his feet, and from his car the regions. Thus they formed the worlds,"

- Rg Veda 10.90 - Purusha Sukta (~ 1500 - 1000 BCE)

One Soul

"Constantly regard the universe as one living being, having one substance and one soul; and observe how all things have reference to one perception, the perception of this one living being; and how all things act with one movement; and how all things are the cooperating causes of all things that exist; observe, too, the continuous spinning of the thread and the contexture of the web."

- Marcus Aurelius (121 - 180)
Meditations

"But can anyone doubt today that all the millions of individuals and all the innumerable types and characters constitute an entity, a unit? Though free to think and act, we are are held together, like the stars in the firmament, with ties inseparable."

- Nikola Tesla (1856 - 1943)

"We cannot fathom the marvelous complexity of an organic being; but on the hypothesis here advanced (pangenesis) this complexity is much increased. Each living creature must be looked at as a microcosm - formed of a host of self-propagating organisms, inconceivably minute, and as numerous as the stars of heaven."

- Charles Darwin (1809 - 1882)

Made of Pattern

"From the systems point of view, the understanding of life begins with the understanding of pattern ... there has been a tension between two perspectives - the study of matter and the study of form - throughout the history of Western science and philosophy. The study of matter begins with the question, 'What is it made of?'; the study of form asks, 'What is its pattern?' Those are two very different approaches, which have been in competition with one another throughout our scientific and philosophical tradition."

- Fritjof Capra (1939 - ) and Pier Luigi Luisi (1938 - )
The Systems View of Life: A Unifying Vision

Ordinary Contemplation

"Therefore it is to a practical mysticism that the practical man is here invited: to a training of his latent faculties, a bracing and brightening of his languid consciousness, an emancipation from the fetters of appearance, a turning of his attention to new levels of the world. Thus he may become aware of the universe which the spiritual artist is always trying to disclose to the race. This amount of mystical perception - this 'ordinary contemplation,' as the specialists call it - is possible to all men: without it, they are not wholly conscious, nor wholly alive. It is a natural human activity, no more involving the great powers and sublime experiences of the mystical saints and philosophers than the ordinary enjoyment of music involves the special creative powers of the great musician."

- Evelyn Underhill (1875 - 1941)
Practical Mysticism: A Little Book for Normal People and Abba