Nothing retains its form; new shapes from old.
Nature, the great inventor, ceaselessly contrives.
In all creation, be assured, there is no death—no death,
but only change and innovation; what we people call birthis but a different new beginning; death is but
to cease to be the same.
Perhaps this may have moved to that and that to this,yet still the sum of things remains the same.
–PythagorasOvid, Metamorphoses
translation by A.D. Melville
There is no universe without perception. Consciousness and the cosmos are correlative. They are one and the same.
Reality is a swirl of information in the mind. This means that absolutely everything, from the trees “out there” to our sense of time and perception of distance, is all being continually constructed and perceived by lightning-quick life-based information systems.
—Robert Lanza
Beyond Biocentrism: Rethinking Time, Space, Consciousness,
and the Illusion of Death.
Finally the old man is telling
the forgotten names
and the names of the stones they came from
for a long time I asked him the names
and when he says them at last
I hear no meaning
and cannot remember the sounds
I have lived without knowing
the names for the water
from one rock
and the water from another
and behind the names that I do not have
the color of water flows all day and all night
the old man tells me the name for it
and as he says it I forget it
there are names for the water
between here and there
between places now gone
except in the porcelain faces
on the tombstones
and places still here
and I ask him again
the name for the color of water
wanting to be able to say it
as though I had known it all my life
without giving it a thought
—W.S. Merwin
from The Rain in the Trees, 1988
This is the essential experience of any mystical realization. You die to your flesh and are born into your spirit. You identify yourself with the consciousness and life of which your body is but the vehicle. You die to the vehicle and become identified…with that of which the vehicle is but the carrier.
–Joseph Campbell
The ultimate nature of the experience of life is that toil and pleasure, sorrow and joy, are inseparably mixed in it. The very will to life that brought one to light, however, was a will to come even through pain into this world; else one never would have got here. And that is the notion underlying the oriental idea of reincarnation.
Since you came to birth in this world at this time, in this place, and with this particular destiny, it was this indeed that you wanted and required for your own ultimate illumination.
That was a great big wonderful thing that you thereupon brought to pass; not the "you", of course, that you now suppose yourself to be, but the "you" that was already there before you were born and which even now is keeping your heart beating and your lungs breathing and doing for you all those complicated things inside that are your life.
You are not now to lose your nerve!
Go on through with it and play your own game all the way!
–Joseph Campbell
Myths to Live By
