ISIGHT
Look within. Within is the fountain of good, and it will ever bubble up, if thou wilt ever dig.
Marcus Aurelius

ISIGHT
Gunter Bubleit

As human beings
Nature’s most gifted children
We have been given
Two kinds of vision.
Two kinds of eyes
Two kinds of bows
One to feed our body
One to feed our souls.

Many creatures have eyesight
Eyes for looking out
But only we have, Isight
An eye for looking in.
An eye that seeks
More truth
More bliss
More love.
An eye that shines
Like guiding star
Above.
Who lives for the day
Is ruled by the night.
Hell is the highway
Without your Isight.
Things are clear
In the light
Altogether better
With Isight.

Two kinds of eyes.
Two kinds of bows.
One to feed my body
One to feed my soul.
Two kinds of eyes.
Two kinds of bows.
One to feed my body
One to free my soul . . .  

I trust in my own soul
that can perceive
The outward and the inward,
Nature’s good and God’s.
Robert Browning

PROGRESS IN ISIGHT
The true progress
of man on earth
is the progress
of an inner vision.
Juan Mascaro

The laws of nature
are turning out to be miraculous
much more beautiful
than you had any right to expect,
symmetrical, economical.
Nobody knows why
they didn’t turn out to be messy laws.
I don’t think people appreciate this fact
about the universe.
Latham Boyle

LINUS:
Do you know how many stars
there are in the sky, Lucy?

LUCY:
Of course!
Three hundred and sixty-five –
one for each day in the year.
We live in what is known as
an orderly universe.
Charles Schultz

THE MARVELOUS ORDER
Einstein would say
that it is an intuition of a
 “marvelous order,
that is responsible
for our
most important
descriptions of reality.”
Albert Einstein

THE APPLE OF ISIGHT
Now the serpent was more subtle
than any beast of the field
which the Lord God had made. 
And he said unto the woman
Yea, hath God said Ye shall not eat
 of every tree of the garden?
And the woman
 said unto the serpent
We may eat of the fruit
of the trees of the garden:
But of the fruit of the tree
in the midst of the garden
And the serpent said unto the woman,
“Ye shall not surely die:
for God doth know that
in the day ye eat thereof
then your eyes shall be opened
and ye shall be as god
knowing good and evil.”
The Bible Genesis

It was not the apple
on the tree,
but the pair
on the ground,
I believe,
that caused the trouble
in the garden.
M.D. O’Connor

Adam and Eve by Edvard Munch

The apple cannot be stuck back
on the Tree of Knowledge;
once we begin to see
we are doomed
and challenged
to seek the strength
to see more
not less.
Arthur Miller

THOU ART THAT
I have said,
Ye are God
And all of you
are children
of the most high.
The Bible  Psalm 82

Know thyself
as the pride of his creation
the link uniting divinity and matter;
behold a part of God himself within thee.
Remember thine own dignity.
Nor dare to descend
to evil or meanness.
Akhenaton 1300 BC

Akhenaton burial

IVOLUTION IS
 THE MOTHER OF ALL RELIGION.

Man is the only animal
that laughs and weeps;
or he is the only animal
that is struck with
the difference between
what things are
and what they ought to be.
William Hazlitt

EYESIGHT TO ISIGHT
What is necessary to change a person
is to change his awareness of himself.
Abraham Maslow

STAGES OF IDENTITY
Material-I-zation
Ideal-I-zation
Real-I-zation

Some boys kiss me
Some boys hug me
I think they’re ok
If they don’t give me proper credit
I just walk away
They can beg and they can plead
But they can’t see the light
‘Cause the boy with the cold hard cash
Is always Mister Right
‘Cause we are living in a material world
And I am a material girl.
Madonna

If the concept of God
has any validity
or any use,
it can only be
to make us larger,
freer and more loving.
If God cannot do this,
then it is time
we got rid of Him.
James Baldwin

IMPROVING HIS ISIGHT
On being asked
why, at the age of 93
he still devoted
three hours a day
to practicing.
Pablo Casals said
“I’m beginning to notice
some improvement.”

THE DIVINE NUISANCE
Pierre Auguste Renoir, one of the great masters of the Impressionist school of painters, was partly disabled with arthritis and gout during the later years of his life.  Still, he never stopped painting.  Near the end of his life Renoir could no longer hold the brushes in his hand and so had them strapped to his wrist. One day another french artist, upon observing the old master at work, asked him:  “Why do any more?  Why torture yourself?”   Renoir’s reply was:  “The pain passes but the beauty remains.”      

SELF-RELIANCE
GOD IS INSIDE NOT ABOVE.
Be ye lamps unto yourselves.
Be your own reliance.
Hold to the truth within yourselves
as to the only lamp.
Buddha

IMPORTANCE OF THE ARTS
If I had my life to live over again.
I would have made a rule to
read some poetry and listen to some music
at least once a week;
The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness and could possibly be
injurious to the intellect, and more probably
the moral character,
by enfeebling the emotional nature.
Charles Darwin

A HIGHER REVELATION
Music
 is a higher revelation
than all wisdom and philosophy.
Music is the electrical soil
in which the spirit lives,
thinks
and invents.
Ludwig van Beethoven

ART
the great teacher
can soothe the mind
heal the soul
unite people
and inspire them
to accomplish great things.

LIGHT OF LIGHTS
He is the light of all lights
which shines
beyond all darkness.
It is vision
the end of vision,
to be reached by vision,
dwelling in the heart of all.
Bhagavad Gita

It is not the brains
that matter most,
but that which guides them –
the character,
the heart,
generous qualities,
progressive ideas.
Fyodor  Dostyovsky

“Heart”
is merely another name for
the Supreme Spirit,
because He is in all hearts.
The entire Universe
is condensed in the body,
and the entire body in the Heart.
Thus the Heart is the nucleus
of the whole Universe.
Ramana Maharshi

Blessed are the pure in heart
for they shall see God.
Jesus of Nazareth

THE I OF THE HEART
We are not human beings
having a spiritual experience.
We are spiritual beings
having a human experience.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

HEART BRAIN
What we know today
about what the heart knows
is truly exciting
and the implications are great.
Relying on a variety of data
from numerous studies and experiments,
particularly heart-rhythm-pattern
measurements,
IHM’s findings point to the human heart
as playing a key role
in the intuitive process,
and a recent study concludes the heart
actually receives intuitive information
faster than the brain –
by a second or slightly more.
This would seem to attribute
some independent
intelligence to the heart:
In fact, the concept of a “heart brain”
is widely accepted today.

A POWERFUL FIELD
It has been established that
the heart has a powerful
electromagnetic field and its own
complex nervous system and circuitry
that generates up to an estimated 60 times
the electrical amplitude of the brain.
The electromagnetic signal
our heart rhythms produce
actually can be measured
in the brain waves
of people around us.
It is no wonder that the findings
by researchers at HeartMath
and elsewhere conclude
the heart has its own organized
intelligence network
enabling it to act independently,
learn, remember and produce feelings –
all attributes which,
until recently,
were nearly universally held
to be solely in the brain’s dominion.
HEARTMATH

WHO ARE YOU?
Near the end of the
Amazing Spider-Man
Peter Parker’s teacher at Midtown High
tells his students:
It’s said there are only 10 plots
 in all of fiction.
But I believe there’s only one:
“Who am I?”

The changing faces of Picasso

WASHINTON POST April 22, 2022
I’m sometimes a little awed by the tenacity of my friends. Rather than being jaded and resigning ourselves to a catastrophic future, we are fighting for change. So, even when I learn about a new climate change catastrophe that is so enormous I can hardly comprehend it, I still have hope. I believe my classmates will save the world — and I’m excited to be a part of that.”  Hannah Johnson, 21,

The Beatles exist apart from my Self.
I am not really Beatle George.
Beatle George is like a suit or shirt
that I once wore on occasion,
and, until the end of my life
people may see that shirt
and mistake it for me. 
George Harrison

I practiced making faces
in the mirror
and it would drive my mother crazy.
She used to scare me
by saying that
I was going to see the devil
if I kept looking in the mirror.
That fascinated me even more,
of course.
Jim Carrey

He who is not aware of the Self
is an animal subject to
creation,
 preservation
and destruction,
whereas,
he who is ever aware
is Siva,
eternal and pure.
There is no doubt of this.
Carefully distinguishing
the transcendental
from the commonplace,
the subtle from the gross
the Self
must always be investigated into
and realized by the vigilant.
The Agamas:
Hindu scriptures

WASHINTON POST April 22, 2022
There are countless places I haven’t been to yet. Innumerable people that I haven’t met. There are favorite songs I haven’t heard, foods I haven’t tasted and books I haven’t read. There’ll be endless times when who, what and where I fall in love with will change the way I see the world. There’s a lot of darkness in the world, but there’s a lot of light, too.” — Natalie Goel, 16, Alexandria, Va.

Money doesn’t make you happy.  
Fame certainly doesn’t make you happy.
People will tell you that are famous
you’ve got to find the happiness
within yourself.
You’ve got to know who you are before you
step into this business,
because if you’re trying to find it,
you’ll probably wind up being
somebody else
that you probably don’t even like.
Whitney Houston

A LACK OF ISIGHT
Benedict Spinoza the great philosopher
known as the “God-intoxicated” man
equated the idea of evil with ignorance,
 the inability to see reality
 from God’s perspective;
to Spinoza, evil reflected
only a lack of understanding,
an incoherent view of reality,
an integration which distorts
the correct arrangement of facts.  
W & M Sahakian

BLACK ELK: OGLALA LAKOTA
Black Elk had many visions
throughout his life
which reinforced what he had
experienced as a boy.
In his vision, [Black Elk] is taken
to the center of the earth,
and to the central mountain of the world.
What mythologist Joseph Campbell
explained as “
the axis mundi, the central point,
the pole around which all revolves…
the point where stillness and movement
are together.

ALL TOGETHER LIKE ONE BEING BLACK ELK SPEAKS

And while I stood there
I saw more
than I can tell
and understood more
than I saw;
for I was seeing
in a sacred manner
the shapes of all things in the spirit,
and the shape of all shapes
as they must live together
 like one being.
And I saw that the sacred hoop
of my people
was one of many hoops
that made one circle,
wide as daylight and as starlight,
and in the center grew
one mighty flowering tree
to shelter all the children
of one mother and one father.
And I saw that it was holy.
 Black Elk

SEEING THE WHOLE
Sometimes
you have to step outside
of the person you’ve been
and remember the person
you were meant to be.
The person you want to be.
The person you are.
H.G. Wells

TO CLEAR YOUR VISION
Purify yourself
by a well-ordered
and useful life.
Watch over your thoughts,
feelings, words and actions.
This will clear your vision.
Nisargadatta Maharaj

BIRDS WITH POOR ISIGHT
Course we have
queer kinda birds hyer,
different kinda birds
f’m like they have at other places.
We have twilldo birds hyer;
they fly backwards.
They don’t care where they’re goin’,
they jus’ wanta see where they been.
Storytellers
Folktales & Legends from the South

1. REVERENCE FOR ALL LIFE
 “Living in the moment brings you a sense of reverence for all of life’s blessings.” – Lao Tzu
The appreciation of all creation, all living things, great and small. Lao Tzu believed respecting all forms of life was an essential part of living in harmony with the universe. Love is freedom. Tao Te Ching Taoism china Chinese present moment calm meditation spiritual spirituality knowing guidance wisdom smart religion Living in the moment brings you a sense of reverence for all of life’s blessings.

2. SINCERITY IN ALL FORMS
 “When pure sincerity forms within, it is outwardly realized in other people’s hearts.” –
Lao Tzu
How can we live in harmony without sincerity? without true authenticity. Being swayed by others opinions or outside influence pulls us away from who we truly are and results in a loss of inner balance. Stay true to yourself. Only by accepting ourselves can we find true peace within.

3. GENTLENESS
 “Kindness in words creates confidence, kindness in thinking creates profoundness, kindness in giving creates love.” – Lao Tzu
Be gentle with thought, feeling, word and action. Being gentle means giving up the need to be right. Being gentle and kind is more important for our inner balance than being seen as correct or asserting our beliefs or ideas onto someone. Practicing gentleness will eradicate any form of negative ego.

4. SUPPORTIVENESS
 “Be supportive. Let go of the ego.” – Lao Tzu
Just like the other cardinal values, supportiveness applies to everything and everyone, including ourselves.. When we help ourselves attain harmony, it will enable us to help others more. Be happy to give without expecting anything in return. Service to others is truly a great virtue.
 “When you succeed in connecting your energy with the divine realm through high awareness and the practice of undiscriminating virtue, the transmission of the ultimate subtle truths will follow.” – Lao Tzu
MICHAEL MACRI  

Do you not see
that you and I
are as the branches of one tree?
With your rejoicing
comes my laughter;
with your sadness start my tears.
Love,
could life be otherwise
with you and me?
Tzu Yeh
265 – 316  A.D.

A kind of waking trance
I’ve had frequently
quite up from my boyhood
when I have been all alone.
This has generally come upon me
through repeating my own name
two or three times to myself silently,
until all at once,
as it were out of the intensity
of the consciousness of individuality,
the individuality itself
seemed to dissolve and fade away
into boundless being;
and this is not a confused state,
but the clearest of the clearest, [seeing]
the surest of the surest,
the weirdest of the weirdest,
utterly beyond words,
where death was an almost laughable
impossibility, the loss of personality
(if so it were) seeming no extinction,
but the only true life.
Alfred Lord Tennyson

IVOLUTION
THE BIG PICTURE
He whose vision
 cannot cover
History’s three thousand years,
Must in outer darkness hover,
Live within the days frontiers.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Consciousness =
energy =
love =
awareness =
light =
wisdom =
beauty =
truth =
purity.
It’s all the SAME.
Any trip you want to take
leads to the SAME place.
 Ram Das (Richard Alpert)

THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS
One can’t believe impossible things,
said Alice
I daresay
you haven’t had much practice,
said the Queen.
When I was your age,
I always did for half an hour a day.
Why sometimes
I’ve believed as many as
six impossible things
before breakfast.
Lewis Carroll

NATURAL GOODNESS
The greatest Ming philospher is
Wang Yangming ; 1472-1528;
who created an anti-intellectual thought
by combining the Neo-Confucian theory of
a universal order
that is given by nature
to every human being
with Mencius’ philosophy of
natural goodness of man.
An innate knowledge
thus enables man to reach
the state of perfection
or that of a “gentleman”
even without learning or studying
the Confucian Classics.

If you paint
close your eyes and sing.
Painters should have
their eyes put out
like canaries,
so they’ll sing better.
Pablo Picasso

A NEUROSCIENTIST’S ISIGHT
“I WAS IN THE FLOW”
My eyes could no longer perceive
things as things that were separate
from one another.
Instead
the energy of everything
blended together .
I was consciously alert
and my perception was
that I was in the flow.
Everything in my visual world
blended together,
and with every pixel radiating energy
we all flowed en masse,
together as one.
It was impossible for me
to distinguish
the physical boundaries
between objects –
because everything
radiated with similar energy.

NIRVANA: A THOUGHT AWAY
I had received from this experience
[a massive stroke]
was the knowledge that
deep internal peace
is accessible to anyone
at any time.
I believe the experience of Nirvana exists
in the consciousness
of our right hemisphere,
and that at any moment,
we can choose to hook into
that part of our brain.
With this awareness,
I became excited about
what a difference my recovery
could make in the lives of others –
not just those who were recovering
from a brain trauma,
but everyone with a brain!
I imagined the world
filled with happy and peaceful people
and I became motivated to endure
the agony I would have to face
in the name of recovery.
My stroke of insight would be:
PEACE IS ONLY
A THOUGHT AWAY,
AND ALL WE HAVE TO DO
TO ACCESS IT
IS SILENCE
THE VOICE OF OUR
DOMINATING LEFT MIND.

My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientistʼs Personal Journey, is a New York Times bestselling and award-winning book written by Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, a Harvard-trained and published neuroanatomist.

THE METAPHORIC MIND
SMARTER THAN WE THINK
During these years, I have been,
I think more open to new ideas.
The ones most important to me
are those having to do with inner space –
the realm of the psychological powers
and the psychic capabilities
of the human person.
In my estimation, this area constitutes
the new frontier of knowledge –
the cutting edge of discovery.
Ten years ago
I would not have made such a statement.
But reading, experience, and conversations
with some people who are working in these fields,
have made me change my mind.
A human being has potentially available
a tremendous range of intuitive powers.
We are indeed much wiser than our intellects.
There is much evidence.
We are learning how sadly
we have neglected the capacities
of the non-rational,
the creative,
the metaphoric mind . . .
the right hemispheres of our brains.
Carl Rodgers

TAKES AN IREVOLUTION TO FACE THE LIGHT
….we must conclude that education
is not what it is said to be by some,
who profess to put knowledge into a soul
which does not possess it,
as if they could put sight into blind eyes.
On the contrary,
our own account signifies that
the soul of every man does possess the power
of learning the truth
and the organ to see it with;
and that,
just as one might have to turn
the whole body round
in order that the eye should see
light instead of darkness,
so the entire soul
must be turned away
from this changing world,
until its eye can bear
to contemplate reality
and that supreme splendor
which we have called the Good.
Hence
there may well be an art
whose aim would be
to effect this very thing,
the conversion of the soul,
in the readiest way;
not to put the power of sight
into the soul’s eye,
which already has it,
but to ensure that,
instead of looking
 in the wrong direction,
it is turned the way it ought to be.
Plato
REPUBLIC
Francis M. Cornford.(Translation)

THE ARTS CHANGE THE BRAIN
One thing we have found is that
the brain physically changes
when we learn.
And that change
is most extensive
and powerful
when emotion
is part of the learning.
The important idea, then,
is that the arts
trigger emotion.
The arts, then,
change the brain
of both the creator,
and the consumer.
James E. Zull

IWARRIOR.WORLD
Anyone who tries
to make a distinction
between
education
and entertainment
doesn’t know the first thing
about either.
Marshall McLuhan

The arts are encroaching
one upon another,
and from a proper use
of this encroachment
will rise the art
that is truly
monumental.
Wassily Kandinsky

It is good to look up to the sky
to contemplate the stars
and the infinity of the heavens,
for to wonder about the vastness of space
should ever keep us humble
and humility is no small treasure.
The telescope at Mount Palomar
enables us to photograph stars
over a billion light years away.
It enables us to see countless millions of galaxies
each with its billions and billions of stars.
We encounter numbers so great
they lose all meaning for us
and still, we see more and more.
One astronomer when asked
how he could believe in a God,
simply replied:
“I just keep enlarging my idea of Him.”
(Author unknown)

THE MARVELOUS ORDER A COSMIC RELIGIOUS FEELING
Albert Einstein, the great physicist and humanist,
tells us that throughout his life
he felt in tune with what he called
“a cosmic religious feeling.”
He explains that
when one experiences it:
“The individual feels the futility
of human desires and aims
and the sublimity and marvelous order
which reveal themselves both in nature
and in the world of thought.”
Einstein would say that it is an intuition
of a “marvelous order”,
that is responsible for our
most important descriptions of reality.

God does not die on the day
when we cease to believe
in a personal deity,
but we die on the day
when our lives cease to be illumined
by the steady radiance,
renewed daily,
of a wonder,
the source of which
is beyond all reason.
 Dag Hammarskjold

The failure of modern culture lies
in the fact that people
are not concerned enough
with the interest of their,
 REAL SELF;
not in the fact that
 they are too selfish,
but that they do not
love themselves.
Erich Fromm

I hate to see myself
on the screen.
I hate the way I look.
I hate the sound of my voice.
I’m always thinking
I should have played it better.
Elizabeth Taylor.

HENRY MILLER:
Some of the most beautiful women
I have ever met tell me,
“I hate myself when I Iook in the mirror.”
I hear that again and again.

DIGBY DIEHL:
Why do you think they feel self-hatred?

HENRY MILLER:
Why?
I figure it’s because they’re empty inside.
They’re seeing themselves as they really are.
So what is the most important thing
in your life?
It is Spirit with a capital S.
Without it you are a nobody, nothing,
or put another way
pure shit.

SPIRITUAL PROGRESS
The degree of
freedom
from unwanted thoughts
and the degree of
concentration
on a single thought
are the measure to gauge
spiritual progress.
Ramana Maharshi

MINDFULNESS
In the past year, evidence has emerged
that a simple, free practice called
“mindfulness”
could change how our cells
and DNA function,
and possibly enhance our longevity.
That’s why I’m resolving to download
a mindfulness app on my phone,
which will remind me
to sit and breathe
and slow down my mind
for just five to 10 minutes each day.
Lynda Balneaves

If I had two loaves of bread,
I would sell one
and buy hyacinths,
for they would feed
my soul.
The Qur’an

AT THE SUBATOMIC LEVEL
THE UNIVERSE IS AN ENERGY FIELD
THAT INTERACTS WITH ITSELF.

IMPROVE YOUR ISIGHT:
The sage
Azid ibn Muhammad al-Nasafi
explains:
When Ali asked Mohammad
“What am I to do
that I may not waste my time?”
The Prophet answered,
“Learn to know thyself.”

The only thing worse than being blind
is having sight but no vision.
Helen Keller

It occurred to me when I was thirteen and wearing white gloves and Mary Janes and going to dancing school, that no one should have to dance backwards all their lives.
Jill Ruckelhaus

BOB MARLEY TRIBUTE
Gunter Bubleit

Open your eyes
Look within
Are you satisfied
with the life you’re livin’?
That’s Bob Marley
Soundin’ like Plotinus
In the third century.

Look into yourself
If you don’t find
Someone beautiful
Someone kind
It may be time, time, time
To smooth out those rough lines.

An angel in the marble
I did see.
I carved and carved
To set him free
That’s Michelangelo
With a message to
Chip away
Until you do
Chip away
Till the light shines through
From your beautiful face.

Dance on
Dance on
Till the sun shines on
Your beautiful face
Dance on
Dance on
Till the sun shines from
Your beautiful face
Dance on
Dance on
Till the sun shines on
Your beautiful face
Dance on.
Dance on
Dance on
Dance on

BE HERE NOW
Become conscious of being conscious.
Say or think “I am”, and add nothing to it.
Be aware of the stillness that follows the
 “I am”.  
 Sense your presence,
the naked unveiled, unclothed beingness.
It is untouched by young or old, rich or poor,  
good or bad, or any other attributes.
It is the spacious womb of all creation,
all form.
Ramana Maharshi

THE DANCE OF LIFE
He who seeth the Supreme Being
existing alike imperishable
in all perishable things,
sees indeed.
Perceiving the same Lord
present in everything
and everywhere
he does not by the lower self
destroy his own soul
but goeth to the supreme end.
He who seeth that all his actions
are performed by Nature only,
and that the self within is not the actor
sees indeed.
And when he realizes perfectly
that all things whatsoever
in nature
are comprehended in the One,
he attains to the Supreme Spirit.
Bhagavad-Gita

THE DIVINE PROGRAMMER
The eminent surgeon [Penfield] concludes:
“Throughout my own scientific career,
I, like other scientists,
have struggled to prove
that the brain
accounts for the mind.”
In conclusion however,
“the mind seems to act
independently of the brain
in the same sense that
a programmer
acts independently of his computer,
however much he may depend upon
the action of that computer
for certain purposes”.
Wilder Penfield

FREE WILL
According to an emerging consensus
among neuroscientists –
and certain philosophers
known as
hard determinists –
you do not have free will.
Nobody does.
“Some will say our sense of will
is really an illusion,”
Itzhak Fried said this week
in a telephone interview from Israel.
He’s a professor of neurosurgery
at both the University of California at Los
Angeles and the Tel Aviv Medical Center.
“Indeed the data support that.”
Oakland Ross
Toronto Star

Everything from a successful hit in a battle, a sudden outburst of rage,
an undesirable transaction and many other things could somehow
be traced back to the gods.
Because of this feature in Homer’s works,
many philosophers even in modern times
remark that Homer was a firm believer in the absence of free will.
Margaret Hunter

No matter what we have come through,
or how many perils we have safely passed,
or how many imperfect and jagged
in some places perhaps irreparably
our life has been, we cannot in our heart of
 hearts imagine how it could have been different.
As we look back on it,
it slips in behind us in orderly array,
and, with all its mistakes, acquires a sort of
eternal fitness, and even, at times,
of poetic glamour.   Randolph Bourne

SCIENCE CATCHES UP WITH THE SAGES
According to British neuroscientist
Patrick Haggard.
“We feel we choose,
but we don’t.”
he told Nature magazine earlier this year.
“Consciousness of a decision may be
a mere biochemical afterthought,
with no influence whatsoever
on a person’s actions.”
Put simply, the devil is in the timing.
Sophisticated neurological experiments
conducted in recent years
consistently show
that the brain of a human subject
begins to prepare for an action
well before the subject has any
conscious awareness that an action
is even in the cards.
Depending on the circumstances,
this biological head start can range
from a few hundred milliseconds
to seven seconds or even more.
Already, Fried and his colleagues
claim the ability to predict a subject’s action
– with 80 per cent accuracy –
a full 700 milliseconds in advance
of a point called W.
That’s the point at which the subjects
themselves become aware
that they have formed the will
to carry out the very action
that has already been predicted by Fried.
You can predict choice
before the subject himself
is conscious of choice,” says Fried.
“There is a whole underworld
that is right there.
It is stunning when you see it
on the level of a single neuron.”

I claim credit for nothing.
Everything is determined,
the beginning as well as the end,
by forces over which we have no control.
It is determined for the insect
as well as for the star,
human beings, vegetables, or cosmic dust,
we all dance to a mysterious tune,
intoned in the distance
by an invisible piper.
Albert Einstein

PAWNEE SONG
Let us see
Is this real
Let us see
Is this real,
This life I am living?
You, Spirits,
You dwell everywhere,
Let us see, is this real,
This life I am living?
North American Native

THE SOUL OF THE INDIAN
The red man divided mind
into two parts, –
the spiritual mind
and the physical mind.
The first is pure spirit,
concerned only
with the essence of things,
and it was this he sought
to strengthen
by spiritual prayer
during which the body is subdued
by fasting and hardships.
In this type of prayer
there was no beseeching a favor or help.
Charles Alexander Eastman
(Ohiyesa)

THE HEART OF THE RIBHU GITA
When one scrutinizes
this variety of manifestation
one realizes that
it does not really exist
and that everything is
the undifferentiated
Absolute Supreme Being
which is not different from
the Self and oneself.
Let this knowledge
become firm with you
by constant practice.
Then, discarding everything,
become one
with the Supreme Reality
and remaining as that,
be happy.
Franklin Jones

DANTE’S GITA
The essence of the Bhagavad Gita
is the vision of God in all things
and of all things in God.
It is the vision of Dante
when he says in his Paradiso:
‘Within its deep infinity
I saw gathered,
and bound by love
in one volume,
the scattered leaves
of all the universe.
The universal form
of this complex whole
I think that I saw,
Because as I say this
I feel my joy increasing.”
Juan Mascaro

THE I AT THE CENTER
During a psilocybin trip when I experienced
the complete dissolution of my ego.
All at once I had burst into a sheaf
of paper slips, no bigger than Post-its,
that were being scattered to the wind.
Yet there was still an “I”
observing this seeming catastrophe,
a paradox I couldn’t explain
but needed to address. Michael Pollan

STONEAGE ISIGHT
The first peace
is that which comes
within the souls of men
when they realize
their relationship,
their oneness,
with the universe
and all its powers.
Black Elk

POWER OF THE STILL MIND
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 rules from it.
Such is the clearness of still water,
and how much greater is that
of the human Spirit!
Chuang Tzu

A Miami Beach ninth grader has turned down the American Legion’s service award because he finds the philosophy of the organization “personally abhorrent.”
“I thanked the faculty responsible for nominating me, “Alfred said later, “but I told them on the basis of conscience I could not accept the award because of the conservative political stance of the American Legion which supports our immoral presence in Indochina.”

When I look inside of me
I see that I am nothing.
That is wisdom.
When I look outside of me
I see that I am everything.
That is love.
Between these two
My life turns.
Nisargadatta

POWER OF LOVE
As I lay in bed,
I was very anxious about my wife
and much disturbed in mind.
And then a great peace came over me.
I was conscious of a lovely,
unexplainable pattern
in the whole texture of things,
a pattern of which everyone
and everything was a part
and weaving the pattern was a Power;
and that Power was
what we faintly call Love.
I realized that we are not lonely atoms in a cold,
unfriendly, indifferent universe,
but that each of us is linked up in a rhythm,
of which we may be unconscious,
and which we can never really know,
but to which we can submit ourselves
trustfully and unreservedly.
F. C. Happold

EXPERIENCE IS
THE MOTHER OF ISIGHT
Life is
like an onion;
you peel it off
one layer at a time,
and sometimes you weep.
Carl Sandburg

What soap is for the body,
tears are for the soul.
Jewish proverb

Build thee more stately mansions,
O my soul, as the swift seasons roll!
Leave thy low – vaulted past!
Let each new temple, nobler than the last,
shut thee from heaven
with a dome more vast,
till thou at length art free,
leaving thine outgrown shell
by life’s unresting sea!
Oliver Wendell Holmes

When you find a few
essential items
that all or virtually all,
the world’s great religions
agree on,
you have probably found
something incredibly important
about the human condition.
Ken Wilber

EGO EXTINCTION
GO WITH THE FLOW
I couldn’t live with myself any longer.
And in this a question arose
without an answer:
who is the ‘I’
that cannot live with the self?
What is the self?
I felt drawn into a void!
I didn’t know at the time that
what really happened was
the mind-made self,
with its heaviness,
its problems,
that lives between
the unsatisfying past
and the fearful future,
collapsed.
It dissolved.
The next morning I woke up
and everything was so peaceful.
The peace was there because
there was no self.
Just a sense of presence
or “beingness,”
just observing and watching.
Eckhart Tolle