Category: the point

I am certain of one thing –
of course I could be wrong –

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)

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

The messages cease to be messages when nobody can read them.

— G. Bateson

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 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.

— Tagore

The vast inconceivable source can’t be faced or turned away from.

— Shitou (Tanahashi and Schneider 1994, 36)

— Byrne and Eno

… everything which happens is infinitely improbable.

— Peirce, W3:337

The name that can be named is not the eternal name.

— Tao Te Ching 1 (Feng/English)

The train that can be expressed is not the express train.

The ability to concentrate attention – to be oblivious to distractions – is a sign of mind. Darwin, for instance, in his study of earthworms, noted that ‘Their sexual passion is strong enough to overcome for a time their dread of light,’ and took this as an indication of mental power:

When a worm is suddenly illuminated and dashes like a rabbit into its burrow – to use the expression employed by a friend – we are at first led to look at the action as a reflex one. … But the different effect which a light produced on different occasions, and especially the fact that a worm when in any way employed and in the intervals of such employment … is often regardless of light, are opposed to the view of the sudden withdrawal being a simple reflex action. With the higher animals, when close attention to some object leads to the disregard of the impressions which other objects must be producing on them, we attribute this to their attention being then absorbed; and attention implies the presence of a mind. Every sportsman knows that he can approach animals whilst they are grazing, fighting or courting, much more easily than at other times. The state, also, of the nervous system of the higher animals differs much at different times, for instance, a horse is much more readily startled at one time than at another. The comparison here implied between the actions of one of the higher animals and of one so low in the scale as an earth-worm, may appear far-fetched; for we thus attribute to the worm attention and some mental power, nevertheless I can see no reason to doubt the justice of the comparison.

— Darwin, The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the action of worms with observations of their habits (Project Gutenberg e-text vgmld10.txt)