The Cosmic Fragments Quotes

The meaning of the river flowing is not that all things are changing so that we cannot encounter them twice but that some things stay the same only by changing.

Writing, like life itself, is a voyage of discovery. The adventure is a metaphysical one: it is a way of approaching life indirectly, of acquiring a total rather than a partial view of the universe. The writer lives between the upper and lower worlds: he takes the path in order eventually to become that path himself. ”I began in absolute chaos and darkness, in a bog or swamp of ideas and emotions and experiences. Even now I do not consider myself a writer, in the ordinary sense of the word. I am a man telling the story of his life, a process which appears more and more inexhaustible as I go on. Like the world-evolution, it is endless. It is a turning inside out, a voyaging through X dimensions, with the result that somewhere along the way one discovers that what one has to tell is not nearly so important as the telling itself. It is this quality about all art which gives it a metaphysical hue, which lifts it out of time and space and centers or integrates it to the whole cosmic process. It is this about art which is ‘therapeutic’: significance, purposefulness, infinitude. ”From the very beginning almost I was deeply aware that there is no goal. I never hope to embrace the whole, but merely to give in each separate fragment, each work, the feeling of the whole as I go on, because I am digging deeper and deeper into life, digging deeper and deeper into past and future. With the endless burrowing a certitude develops which is greater than faith or belief. I become more and more indifferent to my fate, as writer, and more and more certain of my destiny as a man.

...The pages and pages of complex, impenetrable calculations might have contained the secrets of the universe, copied out of God's notebook. In my imagination, I saw the creator of the universe sitting in some distant corner of the sky, weaving a pattern of delicate lace so fine that that even the faintest light would shine through it. The lace stretches out infinitely in every direction, billowing gently in the cosmic breeze. You want desperately to touch it, hold it up to the light, rub it against your cheek. And all we ask is to be able to re-create the pattern, weave it again with numbers, somehow, in our own language; to make the tiniest fragment our own, to bring it back to eart.

In my imagination, I saw the creator of the universe sitting in some distant corner of the sky, weaving a pattern of delicate lace so fine that even the faintest light would shine through it. The lace stretches out infinitely in every direction, billowing gently in the cosmic breeze. You want desperately to touch it, hold it up to the light, rub it against your cheek. And all we ask is to be able to re-create the pattern, weave it again with numbers, somehow, in our own language; to make even the tiniest fragment our own, to bring it back to earth.

The death of fire is the birth of air, and the death of air is the birth of water. For it is death to souls to become water, and death to water to become earth. But water comes from earth; and from water, soul. Cold things become warm, and what is warm cools; what is wet dries, and the parched is moistened. And it is the same thing in us that is quick and dead, awake and asleep, young and old; the former are shifted and become the latter, and the latter in turn are shifted and become the former.

During this investigation, I became familiar with certain limits of the rational gaze. It tends to fragment reality and to exclude complementarity and the association of contraries from it's field of vision...The rational approach starts from the idea that everything is explainable and that mystery is in some sense the enemy. This means that it prefers pejorative, and even wrong, answers to admitting its own lack of understanding.

From a cosmic perspective, our world is just a fantastically improbable fragment of perfect chaos.

So far as we know, the tiny fragments of the universe embodied in man are the only centers of thought and responsibility in the visible world. If that be so, the appearance of the human mind has been so far the ultimate stage in the awakening of the world; and all that has gone before, the striving of myriad centers that have taken the risks of living and believing, seem to have all been pursuing, along rival lines, the aim now achieved by us up to this point. They are all akin to us, for all these centers - those which led up to our own existence and the far more numerous others which produced different lines of which many are extinct - may be seen engaged in the same endeavor towards ultimate liberation. We may envisage then a cosmic field which called forth all these centers by offering them a short-lived, limited, hazardous opportunity for making some progress of their own towards an unthinkable consummation. And that is also, I believe, how a Christian is placed when worshiping God.

I do not understand how any one can live without some small place of enchantment to turn to. In the forest there is a constant stirring in the treetops, as though on the stillest days the breathing of the earth is yet audible…The universe breathed, and the world inside it breathe same breath. This was the cosmic life, with suns and moons to make it lovely. It was important only to keep close enough to the pulse to feel its rhythm, to know… one’s own minute living is a torn fragment of a larger cloth. Collected in: Sisters of the Earth: Women's Prose and Poetry About Nature by Lorraine Anderson

What would be my, how should I call it, spontaneous attitude towards the universe? It's a very dark one. The first thesis would have been a kind of total vanity: there is nothing, basically. I mean it quite literally, like… ultimately there are just some fragments, some vanishing things. If you look at the universe, it's one big void. But then how do things emerge? Here, I feel a kind of spontaneous affinity with quantum physics, where, you know, the idea there is that universe is a void, but a kind of a positively charged void. And then particular things appear when the balance of the void is disturbed. And I like this idea of spontaneous very much that the fact that it's just not nothing…　Things are out there.　It means something went terribly wrong…　that what we call creation is a kind of a cosmic imbalance, cosmic catastrophe,　that things exist by mistake. And I'm even ready to go to the end and to claim that the only way to counteract it is to assume the mistake and go to the end. And we have a name for this. It's called love. Isn't love precisely this kind of a cosmic imbalance? I was always disgusted with this notion of "I love the world" universal love. I don't like the world. I don't know how… Basically, I'm somewhere in between “I hate the world” or “I'm indifferent towards it.” But the whole of reality, it's just it. It's stupid. It is out there. I don't care about it. Love, for me, is an extremely violent act. Love is not “I love you all.” Love means I pick out something, and it's, again, this structure of imbalance. Even if this something is just a small detail… a fragile individual person… I say “I love you more than anything else.” In this quite formal sense, love is evil.

The world is so big, so complicated, so replete with marvels and surprises that it takes years for most people to begin to notice that it is, also, irretrievably broken. We call this period of research “childhood.” There follows a program of renewed inquiry, often involuntary, into the nature and effects of mortality, entropy, heartbreak, violence, failure, cowardice, duplicity, cruelty, and grief; the researcher learns their histories, and their bitter lessons, by heart. Along the way, he or she discovers that the world has been broken for as long as anyone can remember, and struggles to reconcile this fact with the ache of cosmic nostalgia that arises, from time to time, in the researcher’s heart: an intimation of vanished glory, of lost wholeness, a memory of the world unbroken. We call the moment at which this ache first arises “adolescence.” The feeling haunts people all their lives. Everyone, sooner or later, gets a thorough schooling in brokenness. The question becomes: What to do with the pieces? Some people hunker down atop the local pile of ruins and make do, Bedouin tending their goats in the shade of shattered giants. Others set about breaking what remains of the world into bits ever smaller and more jagged, kicking through the rubble like kids running through piles of leaves. And some people, passing among the scattered pieces of that great overturned jigsaw puzzle, start to pick up a piece here, a piece there, with a vague yet irresistible notion that perhaps something might be done about putting the thing back together again. Two difficulties with this latter scheme at once present themselves. First of all, we have only ever glimpsed, as if through half-closed lids, the picture on the lid of the jigsaw puzzle box. Second, no matter how diligent we have been about picking up pieces along the way, we will never have anywhere near enough of them to finish the job. The most we can hope to accomplish with our handful of salvaged bits—the bittersweet harvest of observation and experience—is to build a little world of our own. A scale model of that mysterious original, unbroken, half—remembered. Of course the worlds we build out of our store of fragments can be only approximations, partial and inaccurate. As representations of the vanished whole that haunts us, they must be accounted failures. And yet in that very failure, in their gaps and inaccuracies, they may yet be faithful maps, accurate scale models, of this beautiful and broken world. We call these scale models “works of art.

Alors, il ne reste plus qu’une seule hypothèse acceptable : c’est que la science d’Idris est bien vraiment cachée dans la Pyramide, mais parce qu’elle se trouve incluse dans sa structure même, dans sa disposition extérieure et intérieure et dans ses proportions ; et tout ce qu’il peut y avoir de valable dans les «découvertes» que les modernes ont faites ou cru faire à ce sujet ne représente en somme que quelques fragments infimes de cette antique science traditionnelle.

Since I began meditating in 1979 (steadily, if not as regularly as intended), I have been a successful songwriter devoted to the greatest good, with my creative ego in service of the whole. Interestingly, I can’t recall any “writer’s block,” ever. Through a sustained channel of appreciative inquiry into the human and Divine, I’m flooded with ideas. (All the more reason to sit quiet, to bathe in the Akashic realm, in universal mind.) If anything, the number of song fragments and essay themes streaming in require more time and consideration than there are hours in a given day or week. This creative abundance is a great joy and, only sometimes, a burden.

The Harmony of the World is the continuation of tye Cosmic Mystery, and the climax of his lifelong obsession. What Kepler attempted here is, simply, to bare the ultimate secret of the universe in an all-embracing synthesis of geometry, music, astrology, astronomy, and epistemology. It was the firat attempt of this kind since Plato, and it is the last to our day. After Kepler, fragmentation of experience sets in again, science is divorced from religion, religion from art, substance from form, matter from mind. The work is divided into five books. The first two deal with the concept of harmony in mathematics; the following three with the applications of this concept to music, astrology, and astronomy, in that order.

There once was a female snake that roamed around a small village in the countryside of Egypt. She was commonly seen by villagers with her small baby as they grazed around the trees. One day, several men noticed the mother snake was searching back and forth throughout the village in a frenzy — without her young. Apparently, her baby had slithered off on its own to play while she was out looking for food. Yet the mother snake went on looking for her baby for days because it still hadn't returned back to her. So one day, one of the elder women in the village caught sight of the big snake climbing on top of their water supply — an open clay jug harvesting all the village's water. The snake latched its teeth on the big jug's opening and sprayed its venom into it. The woman who witnessed the event was mentally handicapped, so when she went to warn the other villagers, nobody really understood what she was saying. And when she approached the jug to try to knock it over, she was reprimanded by her two brothers and they locked her away in her room. Then early the next day, the mother snake returned to the village after a long evening searching for her baby. The children villagers quickly surrounded her while clapping and singing because she had finally found her baby. And as the mother snake watched the children rejoice in the reunion with her child, she suddenly took off straight for the water supply — leaving behind her baby with the villagers' children. Before an old man could gather some water to make some tea, she hissed in his direction, forcing him to step back as she immediately wrapped herself around the jug and squeezed it super hard. When the jug broke burst into a hundred fragments, she slithered away to gather her child and return to the safety of her hole. Many people reading this true story may not understand that the same feelings we are capable of having, snakes have too. Thinking the villagers killed her baby, the mother snake sought out revenge by poisoning the water to destroy those she thought had hurt her child. But when she found her baby and saw the villagers' children, her guilt and protective instincts urged her to save them before other mothers would be forced to experience the pain and grief of losing a child. Animals have hearts and minds too. They are capable of love, hatred, jealousy, revenge, hunger, fear, joy, and caring for their own and others. We look at animals as if they are inferior because they are savage and not civilized, but in truth, we are the ones who are not being civil by drawing a thick line between us and them — us and nature. A wild animal's life is very straightforward. They spend their time searching and gathering food, mating, building homes, and meditating and playing with their loved ones. They enjoy the simplicity of life without any of our technological gadgetry, materialism, mass consumption, wastefulness, superficiality, mindless wars, excessive greed and hatred. While we get excited by the vibrations coming from our TV sets, headphones and car stereos, they get stimulated by the vibrations of nature. So, just because animals may lack the sophisticated minds to create the technology we do or make brick homes and highways like us, does not mean their connections to the etheric world isn't more sophisticated than anything we could ever imagine. That means they are more spiritual, reflective, cosmic, and tuned into alternate universes beyond what our eyes can see. So in other words, animals are more advanced than us. They have the simple beauty we lack and the spiritual contentment we may never achieve.

For unknown ages after the explosive outpouring of matter and energy of the Big Bang, the Cosmos was without form. There were no galaxies, no planets, no life. Deep, impenetrable darkness was everywhere, hydrogen atoms in the void. Here and there, denser accumulations of gas were imperceptibly growing, globes of matter were condensing-hydrogen raindrops more massive than suns. Within these globes of gas was kindled the nuclear fire latent in matter. A first generation of stars was born, flooding the Cosmos with light. There were in those times, not yet any planets to receive the light, no living creatures to admire the radiance of the heavens. Deep in the stellar furnaces, the alchemy of nuclear fusion created heavy elements from the ashes of hydrogen burning, the atomic building blocks of future planets and lifeforms. Massive stars soon exhausted their stores of nuclear fuel. Rocked by colossal explosions, they returned most of their substance back into the thin gas from which they had once condensed. Here in the dark lush clouds between the stars, new raindrops made of many elements were forming, later generation of stars being born. Nearby, smaller raindrops grew, bodies far too little to ignite the nuclear fire, droplets in the interstellar mist on their way to form planets. Among them was a small world of stone and iron, the early Earth. Congealing and warming, the Earth released methane, ammonia, water and hydrogen gases that had been trapped within, forming the primitive atmosphere and the first oceans. Starlight from the Sun bathed and warmed the primeval Earth, drove storms, generated lightning and thunder. Volcanoes overflowed with lava. These processes disrupted molecules of the primitive atmosphere; the fragments fell back together into more and more complex forms, which dissolved into the early oceans. After a while the seas achieved the consistency of a warm, dilute soup. Molecules were organized, and complex chemical reactions driven, on the surface of clay. And one day a molecule arose that quite by accident was able to make crude copies of itself out of the other molecules in the broth. As time passed, more elaborate and more accurate self replicating molecules arose. Those combinations best suited to further replication were favored by the sieve of natural selection. Those that copied better produced more copies. And the primitive oceanic broth gradually grew thin as it was consumed by and transformed into complex condensations of self replicating organic molecules. Gradually, imperceptibly, life had begun. Single-celled plants evolved, and life began generating its own food. Photosynthesis transformed the atmosphere. Sex was invented. Once free living forms bonded together to make a complex cell with specialized functions. Chemical receptors evolved, and the Cosmos could taste and smell. One celled organisms evolved into multicellular colonies, elaborating their various parts into specialized organ systems. Eyes and ears evolved, and now the Cosmos could see and hear. Plants and animals discovered that land could support life. Organisms buzzed, crawled, scuttled, lumbered, glided, flapped, shimmied, climbed and soared. Colossal beasts thundered through steaming jungles. Small creatures emerged, born live instead of in hard-shelled containers, with a fluid like the early ocean coursing through their veins. They survived by swiftness and cunning. And then, only a moment ago, some small arboreal animals scampered down from the trees. They became upright and taught themselves the use of tools, domesticated other animals, plants and fire, and devised language. The ash of stellar alchemy was now emerging into consciousness. At an ever-accelerating pace, it invented writing, cities, art and science, and sent spaceships to the planets and the stars. These are some of the things that hydrogen atoms do, given fifteen billion years of cosmic evolution.

Are you willing to enter the divine realm? Are you willing to participate in God’s suffering? The Devil is the reification of God’s torment and rage against what he has had to endure, the cosmic pain he has felt over so many millennia. God suffered the ultimate fragmentation. He was torn into as many pieces as there are monads. No one was ever more torn asunder, more split apart, than God. And then he had to put himself together again. Hell is another dimension of heaven, not a separate location.

However, some individuals claim that such defense strategies could prove more difficult than initially assessed. Charles El Mir of Johns Hopkins University reminds experts that if nuclear bombs were sent into space to blast an asteroid apart, the gravitational force of larger space bodies may result in only temporary fragmentation, followed by pieces being drawn back together through the

once inserted into the cosmos, once his individual life is set going in harmony with the cosmic order, the wise man understands that we simple mortals are merely a fragment of this whole, an atom of eternity, so to speak, one element of a totality that cannot disappear. So that, ultimately, for the sage, death ceases to be truly real. In a nutshell, death is but a passage from one state to another—and, considered as such, it should no longer hold any terrors for us.

All conscious beings share a common privilege. We are all hoping and suffering, recognizing and realizing, fearful and fervent. We are all cosmic weavers: the frog mind and the hummingbird mind and the chimpanzee mind pluck out kaleidoscopic snapshots of the universe’s unfolding within their resonance, knotting the ceaseless torrent of chaos into a prismatic tapestry. In these animal minds, as in our own minds, we gather up fleeting fragments of reality and transform them into feeling, a cosmos within a cosmos.

This involves a deep commitment to self-transformation, submission to a course of discipline by which the mind is tricked out of its conventional habit patterns, and a loving regard for the guru, who must be viewed not as an individual but essentially as a cosmic function. That function is designed to obliterate the illusion of discipleship. Thus the spiritual process between guru and disciple is of a highly paradoxical nature: In order to open to the guru’s transmission and allow it to work the miracle of transformation in us, we must assume the role of the disciple and hence deem the guru as external to ourselves. Yet the guru’s transmission stems from the Spirit itself, which is not separate from us, since it is our very own ultimate identity. The whole spiritual path shares in this paradox. The reason, Yoga tells us, is that while we are inherently free, we do not at present realize this in every moment. Instead we consider ourselves conditioned by all kinds of limiting factors. This turns us into seekers. The search ends when we fully and in every moment live in and as the Spirit, which is truly indivisible whole, whereas the so-called individual is in fact a fragmented being conjured by the illusion of the ego. The guru is the ultimate ego buster. Even while the guru has immense sympathy for the disciple who still thinks of himself as a finite island unto himself—an illusion that is fraught with suffering (duhkha)—the guru constantly and patiently attempts to draw the disciple out of himself and into the supra-individual and universal Self. In this task the guru is governed by wisdom (prajnā) and compassion (karunā), which are themselves supraindividual capacities that are oriented toward the Spirit rather than the finite human personality.

When art and experience get spliced, cosmic fragments are born.

but there was something about the way it moved, a trace of hesitation, a tentative quality, that did not seem proper to anything large and remote. The stars for instance. We began to remember the stars. The stars had never hesitated. Perhaps the noble certainty of their gait had been a mere effect of distance. Perhaps in fact they had hurtled wildly, enormous furnace-fragments of a primal bomb thrown through the cosmic dark; but time and distance soften all agony. If the universe, as seems likely, began with an act of destruction, the stars we had used to see told no tales of it. They had been impeccably serene

The language of this mystery school is one of spiritual alchemy. With it we’ll learn to transform heavy physical relationships and emotions into spiritual gold. This process involves prayer and contemplation, and it also requires examining all the fragments of your life experiences and relationships. You’ll be researching your archetypes’ energy chemistry—how they express and assert themselves in and through your life. By discovering and working with your individual archetypal companions, your connections to the cosmic forces directing your life, you will consciously affect the course of your life.

At a time when actual governance in Europe was as broken and fragmented as it could possibly be, its intellectuals were busying themselves arguing about the exact division of powers within a single, grand, unified, imaginary system of cosmic administration.

Most people respond automatically to their given circle of representation, and strengthen it by their unconscious allegiance. Since their cultural circle is made of many conflicting drives for their allegiance, their lives are fragmented and ambiguous.

Searching outside for fragments of happiness, fulfillment, acceptance, shelter, or love will never truly satisfy you. You have a treasure within that not only holds all those elements, but is infinitely vaster than anything the universe can give you. Once you "know" the pure bliss of Being, all external happiness becomes meaningless. This treasure has been given many times. Nowadays, many people call it "enlightenment." This subconsciously creates the idea of something far away, something impossible for the common human, something that is not present in ourselves already. This is the ego's game, trying to hide and elude us of our peaceful natural state of Beingness. This inherent state is a state of oneness with "something" unfathomable and deathless, which is what we really are in our deepest core, beyond all forms.

Știința a ușurat, într-adevăr, suferințele cauzate de boli și de mizerie, și ne-a oferit o sumedenie de mașinării pentru distracția și confortul nostru, dar ne-a lăsat o lume lipsită de minunea frumuseții. Apusurile de soare au fost reduse la frecvențe și lungimi de undă. Complexitatea universului a fost transpusă în ecuații matematice. Ne-a fost distrus chiar și respectul nostru de sine, ca ființe omenești. Știința afirmă că Pământul și locuitorii săi nu sunt altceva decât un strop nesemnificativ în marele proiect universal. Un accident cosmic. Însăși tehnologia care promite să ne unească, tocmai ea ne desparte. Fiecare individ se află acum într-o interconexiune electronică cu întreg globul și totuși ne simțim mai singuri ca niciodată. De pretutindeni ne asaltează violența, agresivitatea, dezbinarea și trădarea. Scepticismul a devenit o virtute. Cinismul și nevoia de dovezi și certitudine înseamnă azi gândire avansată. E de mirare deci că oamenii se simt acum mai deprimați decât în orice alt moment al istoriei noastre? Mai are știința ceva sacru? Ea caută răspunsuri disecând pruncii încă nenăscuți! Ba chiar visează să ne restructureze până și ADN-ul! Ștința sfărâmă lumea lui Dumnezeu în fragmente din ce în ce mai mici, din dorința de a-i pătrunde înțelesul... și tot ce găsește nu sunt decât alte întrebări.

[The cosmic impact that started the Younger Dryas] marked the end of their story, and the end of an epoch, really. There's not a single Clovis point found anywhere in North America that's above that black mat. They're all in it or below it. And there's not a single mammoth skeleton anywhere in North America that's above it. A huge part of the die-off could have been as a direct result of the impacts themselves, but impacts and airbursts south of the ice cap, particularly as far south as New Mexico, would also have set off wildfires. There's overwhelming evidence that gigantic wildfires raged at the onset of the Younger Dryas--in fact, more soot has been found at the Younger Dryas Boundary than at the Cretaceous-Paleogene Boundary. We did the calculations and it looks like as much as 25 percent of the edible biomass and around 9 percent of the total biomass of the planet was on fire and destroyed within days or weeks of the YDB. So in many areas if the animals weren't killed outright they wouldn't have been able to forage enough food afterwards to survive. The grass would have burned up, leaves on trees were gone. ... And you know, the other thing is that when comet fragments come in they're traveling incredibly fast and they literally punch a hole in the atmosphere. They actually push the air aside and they bring in that super cold from space, and when they explode in the air that cold plume continues to the ground and you literally have things frozen in place if they were close enough to where the plume came down. It's possible they were fried and then frozen all within a matter of seconds.

When ego, unopposed, assumes its throne, The world, in fragments, reaps the seeds it’s sown. A kaleidoscope of discord and divide, Where separate streams in ceaseless turmoil bide. Through ego’s lens, reality transforms, A battleground where rampant desire storms. A sphere of strife, of victory and loss, Where fortunes shift as dice of fate are tossed. In ego’s solitary, narrow view, The world is painted in a hue so skewed. Confined by fears, by selfish dreams confined, Its canvas bears the limits of the mind. Thus, perception, in its manifold grace, Reflects the light of ego and soul’s face. In balance, may the truest sight be found, Where essence and ego in harmony abound. In the crucible where essence blends with sight, A wondrous transformation takes its flight. Where once division’s shadow coldly lay, Interconnection’s dawn breaks forth in day. What opposition’s harsh gaze once discerned, To harmonies of concord is now turned. The essence, with its ancient wisdom’s glow, Unveils the unity that lies below. Each leaf and stone, each soul that wanders free, A note within reality’s grand symphony. Essential, bound within the vast expanse, In life’s intricate, cosmic dance. This alchemical shift in vision’s sphere, Brings forth changes profound, both far and near. Challenges, once daunting, now unfold, As growth’s opportunities, bright and bold. Foes, once clad in enmity’s harsh guise, Transform to teachers, wise beneath the skies. Each joy, each pain, in life’s intricate weave, Threads of our evolution, we perceive. No longer a stage for vain rivalry’s play, But a landscape where learning’s blossoms sway. Growth and learning, in rich abundance, thrive, In this new world where our spirits come alive. Where once the ego’s voice, in solo strain, Ruled with iron will, in self’s domain, Now in harmony with the soul’s sweet song, It finds a place where it truly belongs. No longer master, but a partner kind, Guiding through life with a humble mind. It learns compassion’s tongue, intuition hears, Acts with mindfulness, as purpose nears. In perception’s alchemy, a journey grand, From fractured states to unity’s soft hand, From discord’s harsh cacophony to peace, A path that leads where true essences release. This sacred path, evolving as it weaves, Into our nature’s heart, where spirit cleaves. The veil of separation gently falls, As interconnectedness softly calls. Upon this path, with every step we tread, Our world transforms, new visions in its stead. The mundane now with sacredness imbues, The ordinary in extraordinary hues. Each day becomes a picture, rich and vast, For deepest truths, in vibrant colors cast. Through alchemy of sight, our roles transcend, Not mere observers, but creators bend. In world’s unfolding tale, we play our part, Co-architects, with collective heart. A reality, where highest potentials shine, In this, your design, our spirits intertwine.