… immersion in the Whole …

The feeling of nature exists in the Gospels. Jesus speaks of the splendour of the lilies of the field. But I said that the oceanic feeling, as I experienced it - which is different from the sentiment of nature - is foreign to Christianity because it does not involve either God or Christ. It is something situated at the level of the pure feeling of existing. I am not certain that it was familiar to the Greeks. You are right to say that they had the feeling of nature, and they had it to the highest degree, but they speak very rarely of immersion in the Whole.

From Pierre Hadot, The Present Alone is Our Happiness (Stanford, 2011)

When I became a bird ...

When I became a bird, Lord, nothing could not stop me.

From Liz Berry, Black Country (London. 2014)

A pure vision of the place where we are ...

The root of the Vajrayana is “pure vision”, or the perception of the perfect purity of all phenomena. To enact this purity of perception, we do not perceive the place where we are now as just any ordinary place; we imagine it to be a celestial buddhafield. As we recite the description in the visualisation, we consider this place itself to be the supreme paradise of Guru Rinpoche, Zangdopalri - the Glorious Copper Coloured Mountain - where everything reflects total perfection. The ground is composed of gold, the trees are wish-fulfilling trees, and the rain is the rainfall of nectar. All beings are dakas and dakinis; the calls of the birds are the sounds of Dharma; the sounds of nature, wind, water, and fire reverberate as the Vajra Guru mantra; and all thoughts are expressions of wisdom and bliss.

From Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche, Guru Yoga (New York, 1999)

Can you feel the silence?

On Hyndford Street where you could feel the silence
At half past eleven on long summer nights
As the wireless played Radio Luxembourg and the voices                                                                whispered across Beechie River
And in the quietness we sank into restful slumber in silence
And carried on dreaming in God

From Van Morrison Hymns to the Silence (1991)

Splintered sunlight

                                              
                                               Walk into splintered sunlight
                                               Inch your way through dead dreams
                                               to another land

                                               From Robert Hunter 'Box of Rain' (1970)

Shall we go ...

                                                Shall we go,
                                                you and I
                                                while we can?
                                                Through
                                                the transitive nightfall
                                                of diamonds

                                               From Robert Hunter, 'Dark Star' (1967)

The master’s tools

... the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. The may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change ...

From Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider (Freedom, California, 1984)

Bursts of persistent lawn

Higher than the world

Well, I'm higher
Than the world
And I'm livin'
In my dreams
I'll make it better than it seems today

And I'm higher
Than a cloud
And I'm livin'
In a sound
I'll make it better than it seems today

Higher than the world
But my head is in a swirl
I got to give life a whirl today

Higher than the clouds
Wrapped up in a sound
I make it better all around today

Higher in my mind
I'm gonna leave these blues behind
And I'll find what I'll find today

'Cause I'm higher than the world
And I'm wrapped up in my dreams
I'll make it better than it seems today

Yes, I'm higher than the world
And I'm livin' in my mind
I got to hold on to what I find today
Just a little bit higher

From Van Morrison Inarticulate Speech of the Heart, 1983

(For Margaret)

The town in the country: summer

... whether we know it here or not ...

The expulsion from Paradise is in its main significance eternal: Consequently the expulsion from Paradise is final, and life in this world irrevocable, but the eternal nature of the occurrence (or, temporally expressed, the eternal recapitulation of the occurrence) makes it nevertheless possible that not only could we live continuously in Paradise, but that we are continuously there in actual fact, no matter whether we know it here or not.

From Franz Kafka, Parables and Paradoxes. In German and English (New York, 1946).

... no theories ...

... the Tathagata had no theories, beause he had seen the nature of things ...

From Walpola Sri Rahula, What the Buddha Taught, (Bedford, 1959).

(Tathagata is the main title the Buddha used to describe himself in the Pali canon: from the Sankrit for one who has transcended all coming and going.)

Become parables

When the sage says: "Go over," he does not mean that we should cross to some actual place, which we could do anyhow if the labour were worth it; he means some fabulous yonder, something unknown to us, something too that he cannot designate more precisely, and therefore cannot help us here in the very least ...

... Concerning this a man once said: "Why such reluctance? If you only followed the parables you yourselves would become parables and with that rid of all your daily cares."
Another said: "I bet that is also a parable."
The first said: "You have won."
The second said: "But unfortunately only in parable."
The first said: "No, in reality: in parable you have lost."

From Franz Kafka, Parables and Paradoxes. In German and English (New York, 1946).

Climbing across

Transcendentalism, as viewed by its disciples,  was a pilgrimage from the idolatrous world of creeds and rituals to the temple of the Living God in the soul. It was a putting to silence of tradition and formulas, that the Sacred Oracle might be heard through intuitions of the single-eyed and pure-hearted.

William Henry Channing, quoted in P. Miller (ed.), The American Trancendentalists. Their Prose and Poetry (New York, 1957).

(Definition of to transcend: from the Latin transcendere, to climb across, thus to journey beyond the limits of everyday habits.)

The object of writing

The object of writing is to grow a personality which in the end enables man to transcend art.
                         
Ludwig Pursewarden