On Dragons and Princesses

We must assume our existence as broadly as we in any way can; everything, even the unheard-of, must be possible in it. That is at bottom the only courage which is demanded of us: to have courage for the most extraordinary, the most singular, and the most inexplicable that we may encounter.

Only he or she who is ready for everything, who excludes nothing, not even the most enigmatical, will live the relation to another as something alive and will wholly expand his or her being.

For if we think of this existence of the individual as a larger or smaller room, it appears evident that most people learn to know only a corner of their room, a place by the window, a strip of floor on which they walk up and down.
Thus, they have a certain security.

And yet that dangerous insecurity is so much more human than that which drives the prisoners in Poe's stories to feel out the shapes of their horrible dungeons and not be strangers to the unspeakable terror of their abode.

We, however, are not prisoners. We have no reason to mistrust our world, for it is not against us.

Has it terrors, they are our terrors; has it abysses, those abysses belong to us; are dangers at hand, we must try to love them.

And if only we arrange our life according to that principle which counsels us that we must always hold to the difficult, then that which now still seems to us the most alien will become what we most trust and find most faithful. How should we be able to forget those ancient myths about dragons that at the last moment turn into princesses; perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave.

—Rainer Maria Rilke
Letters to a Young Poet

CCTV

An excerpt from Gifts of Unknown Things by biologist Lyall Watson, quoted in Perfect Brilliant Stillness by David Carse:

"The squid has an eye which is astonishing to find in a mollusc such as itself, a fairly undeveloped unsegmented invertebrate. The eye of the squid is extraordinarily developed: an iris, a lens that can focus at variable distances, and a retina with both rod and cone cells for seeing both contrast and color. The eye of the squid is every bit as developed as the human eye and has the ability to see as well. In spite of this, the animal to which this eye is attached does not have a brain with anything close to the capacity to process the visual information provided by the amazing eye. In fact it doesn’t really have a brain at all. Its nervous system has only very rudimentary nerve ganglia which serve the basic motor functions of the organism; no brain, no optic center to form images from the vast information received by the complex eye.

Also, there are literally billions of squid. They are highly mobile, and are present throughout the oceans; at every depth, every temperature gradient, in every ocean of the world, day and night. An eye capable of the best vision on the planet. Attached to a highly mobile and ubiquitous but extremely simple and easily reproduced organism, with a rudimentary nervous system having hardly any optical processing ability.

I read the book many years ago, but I still remember being absolutely floored by the implications of the one-liner with which Watson concluded his discussion on the squid:

Visitors are warned that this facility is under constant closed-circuit surveillance.

I wonder now if Watson knew how close he was:

Seeing truly is not merely a change in the direction of seeing but a change at its very center, in which the seer himself disappears. (Ramesh)

It is clear that it is not the body/minds, not the organisms, human or squid, that are seeing. That which is seeing through the squid’s eye is that which is seeing through what you call ‘your’ eyes.

That which is seeing is All.

That's It, Folks

Just as a person may dream that they grow up, go to school, make friends, get educated, fall in love, get married, find a job, have children, enjoy the pleasures and pains of family life, have grandchildren, get sick, grow old, find themselves surrounded by their family on their deathbed and, as they die, wake up to find that they were peacefully sleeping all along in their bed, so our Self – pure Awareness – experiences the life of the apparently separate self, eternally at rest in its own Being, without ever going anywhere or doing anything.

Rupert Spira

Forgetfulness

Oh faithful friend,
Come, come closer
Let get of “you” and “I”
Come, quickly.

You and I
have to live
As if you and I
have never heard
of a you
and
an I.

Rumi

Alan Watts Asks, What Does 'Loving Myself' Mean?

I try to go deeper, sinking thought and feeling down and down to their ultimate beginnings. What do I mean by loving myself? In what form do I know myself? Always, it seems, in the form of something other, something strange; The landscape I am watching is also a state of myself, of the neurons in my head. I feel the rock in my hand in terms of my own fingers. And nothing is stranger than my own body—the sensation of the pulse, the eye seen through a magnifying glass in the mirror, the shock of realizing that oneself is something in the external world.

At root, there is simply no way of separating self from other, self-love from other-love. All knowledge of self is knowledge of other, and all knowledge of other knowledge of self. I begin to see that self and other, the familiar and the strange, the internal and the external, the predictable and the unpredictable imply each other. One is seek and the other is hide, and the more I become aware of their implying each other, the more I feel them to be one with each other. I become curiously affectionate and intimate with all that seemed alien. In the features of everything foreign, threatening, terrifying, incomprehensible, and remote I begin to recognize myself. Yet this is a "myself" which I seem to be remembering from long, long ago—not at all my empirical ego of yesterday, not my specious personality.

The "myself" which I am beginning to recognize, which I had forgotten but actually know better than anything else, goes far back beyond my childhood, beyond the time when adults confused me and tried to tell me that I was someone else; when, because they were bigger and stronger, they could terrify me with their imaginary fears and bewilder and outface me in the complicated game that I had not yet learned. (The sadism of the teacher explaining the game and yet having to prove his superiority in it.) Long before all that, long before I was an embryo in my mother's womb, there looms the ever-so-familiar stranger, the everything not me, which I recognize, with a joy immeasurably more intense than a meeting of lovers separated by centuries, to be my original self. The good old sonofabitch who got me involved in this whole game,

At the same time everyone and everything around me takes on the feeling of having been there always, and then forgotten, and then remembered again. We are sitting in a garden surrounded in every direction by uncultivated hills, a garden of fuchsias and hummingbirds in a valley that leads down to the westernmost ocean, and where the gulls take refuge in storms. At some time in the middle of the twentieth century, upon an afternoon in the summer, we are sitting around a table on the terrace, eating dark homemade bread and drinking white wine.

And yet we seem to have been there forever, for the people with me are no longer the humdrum and harassed little personalities with names, addresses, and social security numbers, the specifically dated mortals we are all pretending to be. They appear rather as immortal archetypes of themselves without, however, losing their humanity. It is just that their differing characters seem to contain all history; they are at once unique and eternal, men and women but also gods and goddesses. For now that we have time to look at each other we become timeless. The human form becomes immeasurably precious and, as if to symbolize this, the eyes become intelligent jewels, the hair spun gold, and the flesh translucent ivory. Between those who enter this world together there is also a love which is distinctly eucharistic, an acceptance of each other's natures from the heights to the depths.

Alan Watts in The Joyous Cosmology

In The Beginning We Were Ageless

We had no age.

We were neither young nor old, adolescent nor decrepit.

Without age. Ageless.

And great fun was had by all forever.

A little later, somebody noticed that it was even more fun to be ageless when we were also pretending to have age.

We pretended all the fun parts of infancy and youth, maturity and old age. We especially liked to pretend the fun parts of being grown up. Because to pretend to be grown up we had to pretend that we weren’t pretending. And that is the hardest and most fun of all.

So we devoted year after decade to it until we got so good at pretending to be grown up that only drugs and enthusiastic charismatics could get us to pretend to be children again.

…In the meantime almost completely forgetting that we are all each ageless in the first place.

Bernie de Koven

Infinite Love

Everything I looked at was an expression of this love, a manifestation of this love. The whole universe was nothing but this immense, infinite love, which I was being bathed in. It was then that I heard a voice ---which was very odd to me, because in my spiritual life, I wasn't prone to visions or hearing voices. I didn't know where it came from, but it just said, "This is how I love you, and this is how you shall love all beings everywhere." When I heard this voice, I knew it was true. This inner voice had told me something that I'd known all along, but I could never make contact with. What I didn't know is that I'd been showered with this love my entire life, but that I was never completely open to it.

Adyashanti