No seed ever sees the flower.
it's all dhamma.: Even chronological time may have no independent existence
“French philosopher Maruice Merleau-Ponty argued that time itself does not really flow and that its apparent flow is ‘a product of our surreptitiously putting into the river a witness of its course.’ That is, the tendency to believe time flows is a result of forgetting to put ourselves and our connections to the world into the picture. Merleau-Ponty was speaking of our subjective experience of time, and until recently no one ever guessed that objective time might itself be explained as a result of those connections. Time may exist only by breaking the world into subsystems and looking at what ties them together. In this picture, physical time emerges by virtue of our thinking of ourselves as separate from everything else.”
Read more at: Is Time an Illusion?: Scientific American
Silver brooch plated with gold, in the form of a double sun-snake, or swastika, found in Iceland.
From Historic ornament, treatise on decorative art and architectural ornament, vol. 1, by James Ward, London, 1909.
from: arsvitaest & oldbookillustrations via: archive.org
The Moment
The moment when, after many years
of hard work and a long voyage
you stand in the centre of your room,
house, half-acre, square mile, island, country,
knowing at last how you got there,
and say, I own this,
is the same moment when the trees unloose
their soft arms from around you,
the birds take back their language,
the cliffs fissure and collapse,
the air moves back from you like a wave
and you can’t breathe.
No, they whisper. You own nothing.
You were a visitor, time after time
climbing the hill, planting the flag, proclaiming.
We never belonged to you.
You never found us.
It was always the other way round.
— Margaret Atwood
Thank you 108 Zen Books
The unknown is not measurable by the known. Time cannot measure the timeless, the eternal, that immensity which has no beginning and no end. But our minds are bound to the yardstick of yesterday, today and tomorrow, and with that yardstick we try to inquire into the unknown, to measure that which is not measurable. And when we try to measure something which is not measurable, we only get caught in words.
(via tapwaterjackson, retrofish)
The whole of life lies in the verb seeing.
Could it think, the heart would stop beating.
Now you understand the Oriental passion for tea,” said Japhy. “Remember that book I told you about; the first sip is joy, the second is gladness, the third is serenity, the fourth is madness, the fifth is ecstasy.
The only Zen you find on the tops of mountains is the Zen you bring up there.